Rehabbing Tonto

The Lone Ranger as Picaresque Tale

by Tony Dayoub

As The Lone Ranger shifts from the point of view of its hero, John Reid (Armie Hammer), to the first-person narrative of his Indian sidekick Tonto (Johnny Depp), the tired pulp story becomes a postmodern picaresque. A type of story with a long literary tradition but seldom seen on film, a picaresque is usually episodic in nature, a fact that contributes to what many perceive is the messiness of The Lone Ranger. Tonto exemplifies the typical picaresque hero (or picaro), noble in intentions but misguided and perhaps even unreliable in his perception of the events in which he is usually at the center. Like Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, this film begins with a rather decrepit Indian as a dubious storyteller, spinning a yarn full of non-sequiturs and magical realism that both uncomfortably overlap with heinous atrocities in order to subvert the typical white victor's perspective of the American western. The first appearance of Depp, made up to look a hundred-odd years old, is itself a metatextual reference to Little Big Man’s protagonist, Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman). Crabb is a white man raised by the Cheyenne who encounters famous figures like Wild Bill Hickok and George Armstrong Custer (who, in The Lone Ranger, finds his own visual parallel in a cavalry officer played by Barry Pepper), just before their grand, untimely ends...

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Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

It's ironic that Tim Burton—whose expressionism-by-way-of-acid-tinged Batman was the forerunner of the modern superhero film—has a new film getting trounced in the box office by The Avengers, the ultimate example of the very kind of genre he helped to usher in at the start of his career. And that this film is Dark Shadows, not only a property with a fervent cult audience but probably the most satisfying effort from Burton in quite a long time. Based on the Gothic soap which ran on ABC from 1966-1971, Dark Shadows is the apotheosis of Burton's artistic concerns, perfectly fusing his love of all things dark and creepy with his off-kilter family dynamics in a way only glimpsed at in previous efforts like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and most precisely (but all too briefly) in his 1984 short, Frankenweenie. In films like Sweeney Todd, Burton gets the sense of dark foreboding right, but misses that infectious feeling of benign wonder which his other movies are bursting with. And most of the rest of his oeuvre, though exuberant in its ability to astonish with imaginative production design and fanciful style, doesn't quite get that Hammer horror feel of movies like Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps Dark Shadows succeeds because, by Burton's own admission, it was a formative influence.

Blu-ray Review: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

by Tony Dayoub



What a difference fifteen years can make. At the time of its release, Kenneth Branagh's version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein struck me as uneven, and worst of all less than horrific. Its recent release on Blu-ray inspired me to watch it again for the first time since its initial release. I was impressed with its emotional resonance this time around, and reminded of just how powerful and horrific the film could be in one particular scene.

Movie Review: Sixty Six - Coming of Age Comedy is Too Slight for Feature Length

by Tony Dayoub

Sixty Six is director Paul Weiland's semi-autobiographical tale about Bernie Rubens (Gregg Sulkin), a well-behaved but rather unremarkable Jewish boy growing up in 1966 England. In sports, he's always the last guy picked to join the team. At home, his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) is too busy babysitting his OCD-afflicted dad (Eddie Marsan), and tending to self-centered older brother Alvie (Ben Newton), to even notice the invisible Bernie's growing problem with asthma.


Bernie eagerly anticipates his upcoming Bar Mitzvah, certain that it will enhance his prestige among his school friends and his family. But after scheduling the celebration, he realizes that it is set for the same day as the 1966 World Cup final. His parents try to allay his fears, emphasizing that no one believes England will even make it to the final. But after a series of escalating mishaps, Bernie starts to realize that even his best efforts at casting spells, hexes, and curses in the direction of England's World Cup team may do little to prevent their destiny.

Reminiscent of Woody Allen's Radio Days, the tale is amusing, though it's story is slight and predictable to the extreme. One would hope that given the closeness he has to the story, Weiland (Made of Honor) would step up his approach to the film's structure. But it becomes obvious that Bernie's story is simply not sufficient to carry a feature length movie. There is a subplot that competes for our attention regarding Manny's business woes. Actor Marsan is so good at playing Manny, that his episodes in the film threaten to steal the spotlight from Bernie's story. To compund the problem, a narration by the lead is used to smooth over the jarring episodic structure. But all it really does is accentuate the cuteness and nostalgia, overly sentimentalizing the story.

There are great performances all around, not only from Marsan, but from Sulkin (in his screen debut), Carter, Stephen Rea as Bernie's doctor, and Richard Katz as Rabbi Linov.

But something is wrong when I care more about England's team making the final, than Bernie's celebration woes. For a more hilarious autobiographical account, rent Radio Days instead and wait for Sixty Six on DVD.

Sixty Six is in limited release. Check local listings for theaters and times.

Stills provided courtesy of First Independent Pictures.