Friday, Oct. 02, 2009

Hitch your 'Wagon' to the crazy train

By Ed Robertson, special to the Herald

This is how much I love you people: at this moment, it's 3:30 on a weekday morning, and I've spent the last three hours watching a 40-year-old western musical that features an intermission, two distinct forms of polygamy, and a singing Clint Eastwood. The unlucky among you will have already guessed I'm wrapping up Western Month with Paint Your Wagon, one of the most bizarre movies I've ever stumbled across.

Maybe it's because he's staggering drunk at the time, but prospector Lee Marvin doesn't know what he's in for when he buys Jean Seberg at auction. In a small mining town with no other women, the male attention his new wife attracts drives Marvin so crazy he has no choice but to hijack a stagecoach full of prostitutes.

That's one corner of the plot, anyway. Paint Your Wagon tries to cover more territory than Lewis and Clark. It's aggressively time-wasting, unafraid to bust out in song at any moment, totally unconcerned it's got enough sideplots to fill a sideplot factory.

Yet I went into this expecting a serious Big Awful Friday candidate and came out indescribably entertained. Not because it was great--it's much too big a mess for that, and for all its fun, it often feels like a chore--but because it's so dang crazy you can't help but get swept along.

It's the mixture of depravity, sentiment, and wholesome comedy that really makes it weird. After Marvin buys his wife, how are we supposed to feel when the whole town shows up to sing along at his riverside makeover? Or when he's so fall-down drunk at his wedding (there's more keeling over in Paint Your Wagon than when the Brazilian rainforest gets clear-cut) he can't even say "I do"?

There are few things on earth more stupefying than listening to drunken quasi-rapists tenderly croon their feelings about women and the wind and then get tree-climbingly excited about the incoming shipment of kidnapped whores. It's especially confusing when these things aren't presented as sleazy or even all that questionable, but with the good-natured cheer of a Broadway musical.

After all that lawless excitement, the climax is heartlessly judgmental, a huge, stupid showstopper that only seems to be there because the story had to find a new way to top its own excess.

Paint Your Wagon is a wrecking ball of contradictions: perverse yet clean, serious and silly, tedious yet fun. If you're going to tackle this one, I'd recommend doing so with someone else in the room. Disaster is always best survived in the company of friends.