REVIEW: ‘Rust’ honours the classic Hollywood western, uneasily

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“Rust,” Alec Baldwin and Joel Souza’s slow-moving, sepia-toned homage to the American western, is the kind of respectable if unremarkable genre exercise that would have come and gone without much notice were it not for the circumstances of its making. In 2021, during rehearsal of a scene, a gun being held by Baldwin – the film’s producer and star – discharged. “Rust’s” director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, was shot in the chest and killed. The production’s armourer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Charges against Baldwin were dropped.

Drenched in such tragedy, “Rust” is almost impossible to judge on the merits. On its own modest terms, it’s a perfectly competent, if inert, throwback: a pastiche of movie characters, gestures and narrative devices that are instantly recognizable to anyone who worships at the altar of John Ford or, more recently, variations like “The Power of the Dog,” “The Hateful Eight” and the Coen brothers’ remake of “True Grit.” Baldwin plays Harland Rust, who rides into a small town in 19th-century Wyoming one fateful night and rides away with 13-year-old Lucas Hollister (Patrick Scott McDermott), an orphan who has been tending what’s left of the family homestead and caring for his little brother until he butts up against the local authorities. Now on the lam, Harland and Lucas light out to the New Mexico territory, their journey punctuated with metronomic regularity by encounters with various miscreants, malefactors and colourful ne’er-do-wells.

Written and directed by Souza, “Rust” is filmed in monochromatic tones of tea-coloured tans and murky browns that announce period-piece seriousness; the interiors are inky to the point of illegibility (Hutchins’s duties were taken over by Bianca Cline). But when Harland and Lucas are on the road, the mountain vistas and thundercloud-strewn skies are breathtaking. (“Rust” was filmed in New Mexico and Montana.) Working from a checklist of genre signifiers, Souza ticks them off one by one: In one scene, a bowler-hatted man playing a rinky-tinky piano stops suddenly when things get serious; you could swear it’s a cue for Leonardo DiCaprio to walk in from the set-within-a-set of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

Varmints, outlaws, scoundrels and bullwhackers – plus a fancy woman or two – populate a world where people don’t talk, they “conversate” in florid swirls of extravagant, self-consciously baroque prose; among the men who are pursuing Harland and Lucas through the scrub are a Bible-quoting bounty hunter and a U.S. marshal in the throes of Dostoyevskian doubt. (They’re played with commendable gusto by Travis Fimmel and Josh Hopkins.)

Harland may be less verbose (“There’s alive, and there’s ain’t. Try to focus on the former”), but he’s no less mannered, as both a speaker and an archetype. As a latter-day Shane, Baldwin makes a dashing man of grizzled mystery, even when it’s possible to catch a glimpse of Jack Donaghy behind the greying beard and steely eyes. (“30 Rock” fans will need to be forgiven for occasionally flashing on Jack’s classic line: “What am I, a FARMER?” Well …) Newcomer McDermott delivers a sturdy, admirably understated performance as Lucas, a boy still learning what it means to be a man, even when manhood has been ruthlessly thrust upon him.

That manhood, of course, is most dramatically tested by way of gunfights, which are plentiful throughout “Rust,” although Souza wisely excised the scene that was being rehearsed when Hutchins lost her life. Still, the movie traffics in the same ritualized shoot-’em-up violence that is just as much a deliverable as fast horses, Stetson cowboy hats and calico house dresses. In the 1800s, guns weren’t considered toys or political totems or testosterone delivery systems: They were tools. It took the movies, including westerns, to turn them into fetish objects.

Even as “Rust” honours and emulates those movies, its own backstory serves as a reminder of the lethal reality behind all the quick-draw posing and macho romance. It’s an uneasy space to occupy, but it’s one, paradoxically, where “Rust” might have its most lasting value.

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Two stars. Unrated. Starts May 2 at select theatres nationwide and on-demand streaming services such as Apple TV+ and Prime Video. Contains thematic material and graphic violence. 133 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.