'Down in the Valley'

By Daniel Fienberg, Zap2It.com | May 12, 2006

Evan Rachel Wood, Edward Norton, 'Down in the Valley'

Strong performances drive this provocative modern Western

In "Down in the Valley," Edward Norton plays Harlan Carruthers, an old school cowboy in a new school world. He may wear the white hat and wander the streets with a lasso under his arm, but he's a man out of place and time in the San Fernando Valley, amidst roaring freeways, rivers created on beds of concrete and a wide blue sky marred by airplanes and crisscrossing power lines. Written and directed by David Jacobson, "Down in the Valley" uses Harlan's disconnectedness as a mirror through which all variety of modern discontents can be displayed. Veering from genre to genre, changing tones on a dime, "Valley" is a consistently well-acted and provocative film that may still leave some viewers scratching their heads.

Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) lives with her father Wade (David Morse) and her brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin) and she's bored. She's intrigued by Harlan, because he's like nothing she's ever seen before, a romantic dreamer who's every bit as lost in the Valley as she is. Harlan takes her dancing and horseback riding and romance blooms, much to Wade's disapproval. The intensity of Harlan's affections lead the film in a darker direction, opening up questions about the cowboy's past.

There's a standard Western plot involving the lone gunman who rides into town, enchants all the residents and offers salvation, but what would Shane have done if nobody needed his help? Would he eventually have caused trouble of his own?

In his previous film, the unsettling "Dahmer," Jacobson created a portrait of a delusional boy incapable of functioning in a man's world. Thanks to Norton's reliably layered performance, Harlan is another variation on that theme. He's mastered the art of being a cowboy -- the lingo, the shooting, the swagger -- but in a place where the wide open spaces of Western iconography have been paved over and blotted out with housing developments, he's dangerously unmoored. Norton introduces the character from a point of utter innocence -- he seems nearly a decade younger in his early scenes -- but adds shadings with each one. As he's done in films like "Primal Fear," "American History X" and "Fight Club," Norton generates suspense by never entirely tipping viewers off if he's supposed to be trusted. Morse, in turn, takes his character in the other direction, beginning as a potentially abusive drunk, but offering hints of different and more sympathetic motivations.

Culkin and, particularly, Wood continue to prove themselves among the best actors of their generation with completely natural performances. I've often liked Wood much more than the movies she's been in, but here her mixture of fire and fragility is a perfect match.

Shot with a mixture of indie sensibility and widescreen scope, "Down in the Valley" is an ambitious film. Jacobson, who grew up in the Valley, loves the geometry of urban sprawl, the angles of strip malls and cell towers against the horizon and the visual irony of tacky civilization carved into the desert.

Like many great Westerns, "Down in the Valley" muses on the place of the individual in the contemporary landscape and it confronts several "Where does it go from here?" plot moments by offering up thematic questions of its own.