Review: The Kid – “An utterly absorbing take on an Old West legend”

Directed by Vincent D’Onofrio
Starring Dane DeHaan, Ethan Hawke, Chris Pratt, Jake Schur, Leila George

“A boy with a gun ain’t a boy…”

The story of Henry McCarty, better known as William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, has long-since entered legend – really the young outlaw’s life was already half myth and legend even in his short lifetime (he was shot dead at the age of only 21), and he remains one of the most famous figures to come out of that short (but hugely influential in movies, TV and other media ever since) history of the Old West, and his relationship with Pat Garrett, the lawman who hunted him down, and it has been told and retold in many ways over the decades. The Kid takes a more unusual approach, however – you could take the title as a reference to DeHaan’s Billy, but equally it could apply to young Rio (Jake Schur), a teenage boy who, along with his older sister Sara (Leila George), finds himself in the orbit of Billy and Pat (Ethan Hawke).

The film begins with violence, a man beating his wife – Rio and Sara’s mother. Rio begs his brutal father to stop, but he keeps hitting his mother until the teenage boy picks up his pistol and shoots him dead with it. He’s too late, his monster of a father had already beaten his mother to death. His father’s outlaw friends, headed by their uncle, Grant Cutler (his father’s brother) – a heavily-bearded Chris Pratt, playing against his regular type – are outside the simple homestead, hear the gun go off and try to break in, but the children escape, trying to flee through the night to Santa Fe where they know a friend of their mother lives. It is on this journey that they encounter Billy and his gang, shortly before they are captured by Pat Garrett and his lawmen.

As the story unfolds we see young Rio (named for the river, which Billy once lived near too) struggling with events – he feels he has to be the man of the family, protect his sister even though she is the older, and he is wrestling with his conscience; his father was a brutal abuser, he may well have deserved to be shot, but it’s still no small thing to take a life. This becomes a central issue for Rio, Pat and Billy. Both like the kid (although Garrett doesn’t know what he has done yet, but he suspects), and each of them will, at different points, talk to the boy about their lives, about how early circumstances in a hard life, even younger than he is now, shaped the existence they’ve lead, one outlaw, one lawman.

This is an era and place where men rarely talked about feelings, and the Western in general often sticks to that approach, stories where Real Men suck it in and just carry on without dwelling on what they have had to do. Not so here as both Hawke’s Garrett and DeHaan’s Billy both at different points around a night-time campfire tell Rio about their youthful hardships and, crucially, about the first time they had to take a life. In both cases, they start in a matter of fact way, but as the stories go on, the emotion wells up in their voices. I was reminded of William Munny in the brilliant Unforgiven, “it’s a hell of a thing to kill a man. Take away everything he ever was, everything he ever will be.” Yes, these are tough cowboys of the West, but they are still people and these events that marked them, made them have had a deep psychological impact that they mostly hide within, but can share with Rio.

This emotional guilt and honesty touches young Rio as he worries about his own culpability in shooting his father. Both men, in their own ways, have reached out to him, bared their own emotional scars that are much like his (the loss of family in early life, the violence, the killing). Rio is, effectively, being given two alternative father figures in Billy and Pat, as he stands at a crossroads of his own life – which kind of path will he follow, one like Billy, or one like Pat? In fact, will he get to choose, or will trying to rescue his sister from the monstrous Grant Cutler force him down a path regardless?

It’s unusual these days for us to see a Western – the genre that once dominated early cinema is now a rarity. Thankfully in The Kid, we have a beautifully-shot Western that explores hard lives and hard decisions, they way they can shape us, dominate what we will become. This is a slow-burn tale, with moments of sudden violence, with a rich emotional undercurrent, and some quite gorgeous cinematography. cinematographer Matthew J Lloyd deserves special praise on that score; film is, after all, a visual medium, and the Western requires strong, iconic visuals more than most genres. Here Lloyd’s lighting and camera moves and angles craft some beautiful cinematic scenes, making even some scenes set around the town gallows look striking, or Rio practising with a pistol, framed by a golden-leafed tree, many of the scenes drenched in that marvellous light quality of the American Southwest. That richness of the visuals and the emotional honesty of Rio, Garrett and Billy combine to make this an utterly absorbing take on an Old West legend.

The Kid is released by Lionsgate on DVD, Blu-Ray and Digital from June 3rd.