Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Originally published on Letterboxd on 04/05/23

“Comes an age in a man's life when he don't wanna spend time figuring what comes next…”

Ruthlessly self-reflexive as a western- as swift and brutal as the bloodshed is here, the archetypical Peckinpah journey towards the abyss is tempered by an absence of readiness to succumb to the inevitable. It is a western where the exchange of cobwebbed memories is treated with as much delicacy and with tension as taut as a duel to the death, and where every ragged outlaw, lawman and brothel owner populating the film emanates such vivid life that it feels genuinely painful to watch them, now old and decrepit, fighting over a cause none of them fully understand or care to understand. Dylan’s role as Greek chorus is particularly revealing in this regard because it renders bare the fact that the outcome of the universal ride into the jaws of death characterising the western as a genre is predetermined, decided when brother takes up arms to hunt brother- but that doesn’t make it any less painful to watch the light fade from the eyes of friends whose names you can hardly remember.