'Rust' review: Alec Baldwin Western's problem is haunted, full of guilt

Ideally, we like to watch movies in a state of intentional ignorance with respect to its creation, even if all the machinery of selling and promoting a film seems to challenge that. But taking western “oxide” is a different matter. It is the film in which the promising director Hallna Hutchins was accidentally murdered by a live round in a support gun aimed at retaining blank, discharged during an essay by its star, Alec Baldwin. The writer and director Josh Souza was also injured by the bullet.

That terrible and avoidable incident is a context that no film should have to endure, even if the thematic issue of “oxide”, the sequelae of violence, the hard path of atonement and, yes, the weapons loaded in the wrong hands, makes this cursed production, three and a half years after the death of Hutchins, feel more like a solemn performance to a trail than a job to be accepted in their own terms.

Anyone who could have assumed that “oxide” was a flight exploitation film at night should know that their bones are largely those of a moody indie with a heart and consciousness. Death and tragedy are through lines aimed at chasing a spectator. Justice is sought, but it is also represented as inappropriate and just the last word. The weapons are abundant, but for the most part, their undoing and shooting entails the appropriate weight. In fact, Clint Eastwood's masterpiece of “Unforgiven” feels like a tonal lodestar for “oxide”, far from a striking and striking shooting.

Before Baldwin even appears as a graynistic outbreak with a mission of mercy, “Rust” prepares, strangely, must be said, as an unfortunate story about an involuntary death of shots. When trying to scare a wolf, the orphan Wyoming Granja boy Lucas (Patrick Scott McDermott) kills by mistake a local rancher with the precious Henry rifle of his family, a weapon that we can say that he has been reluctant to use. He is arrested, thrown into jail, then sentenced to the gallows.

Bloody Escape comes in the form of killing the thief Harland Rust (Baldwin), grandfather Lucas never knew what he had. Its destiny is Mexico, but they have persecutors in the form of a group led by a firm and moroselily philosophical miloselly played by a solid Josh Hopkins and, separately, a spooky rewards hunter (Travis Fimmel, a little cooked).

The border characters with colorful language come and go in outbreaks of living room and dialogue next to the fire. “Rust” talks about a good game about the brutality and despair that are easily called when living is difficult. But the central relationship between Baldwin's veteran murderer and McDermott's innocent marking never swell in significant intergenerational intimacy, and the persecution around him feels serpentant. In his trail of hunter and hunted, damn and convicted, “Rust” struggles to justify his execution time of more than two hours. (If only the narrative economy of Anthony Mann or Budd Boeticher were other gender inspirations).

“A man makes his decisions,” he tells his crispy and full of Baldwin's fault to his grandson in a moment. It is worth mentioning that “Rust”, a film director Souza, was completed agonizingly at the request of Hutchins' family, is a lasting testimony of his obvious talent. (Bianca Cline completed cinematography when production resumed the filming, and the film is dedicated to Hutchins).

There is an elegant gravity in the natural elements that share the frame with the characters of the film, manifested in silhouettes against vast cloudy skies, delicate snowfall, dark -timing wells and crunchy air full of smoke and dust. A testimony of cut lives, “Rust” is beautifully filmed and all sadder for it.