Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 77

0 Austin American-Statesman Friday, November 5, 1993 This section is recyclable Ballad' reworks cowboy myth iff A FILM IV MACCIE GlEENWAlD cT(ieBakdofiltkJo 2:00 4:30 7:05 9:30 Christian Slater A Dazed and Confused Patricia True 12:00 tb Ch, JC5 By Michael MacCambridge American-Statesman Staff If The Ballad of Little Jo had been a song instead of a movie, it would have been one of those dense, fantastic, 11-minute-long tall tales that Bob Dylan used to concoct, right around the time of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts. But Maggie Greenwald's revisionist Old West saga is a movie, and a riveting one at that, about the travels of Josephine (Suzy Amis), an upper-class Eastern socialite who is cast aside by her father after giving birth to an illegitimate child. Leaving the child with her sister, she heads out West, soon discovering that a woman alone is a marked traveler, certain of a fate no better than being sold as a prostitute (as one unctuous old cowboy tries to do). After reaching mining territory, she decides that she can only survive by going incognito. With a scissors to her hair and a long, self-inflicted gash along her fair cheek to toughen up her countenance she becomes the lonesome traveler Joe Monoghan.

In Greenwald's Old West, the male-dominated mining town of Ruby City is made up of men who are barely human. Unshaved, uneducated, unkempt and unenlightened, the townsfolk seemed ruled by their appetites, whether it be for whiskey, women or fighting. Inevitably, this slight, soft-skinned newcomer has some proving to do. The other male settlers find him peculiar (he doesn't take part in monthly visits from an out-of-town prostitute), but they give Jo a share of grudging respect. As the woman passing herself off as a man, Suzy Amis is powerfully convincing.

The slight but strong Amis (who co-starred in last year's underrated Watch It) has always been a cerebral beauty. Here she channels that intelligence into a hyper-alert self- llii vf -5 A i I Arquette Romance Midnight Held Sunday SatSun Sex Is. 3I QiMdWup TT-UM i I USlUIUUIWUilUL TKXl "viiii li Hi tan r.v.' I lliiiHiiliiii' iff 'I Suzy Amis, left, plays a woman who West. Ian McKellen is Percy. Film review The Ballad of Utile Jo Stars: Suzy Amis, Bo Hopkins Director.

Maggie Greenwald MPAA rating: Theater Dobie Critic's rating: awareness, of the woman working very hard to be the only kind of man she knows how to be. With Declan Quinn's stark cinematography, Greenwald bathes the first hour of this picture in an unforgiving light, underscoring the harsh terrain and the woman's rough journey through it. What emerges is an ingenious reworking of the myth of the lonesome cowboy. But in the second half, Greenwald becomes preachy, working in a subplot about a group of robber baron landowners from back East and Jo's halting romance with a Chinese man, called Tinman Wong (David Chung) by the locals, NOW SHOWING rz3 PRESIDIO THEATRES iilll'l llhrf 1 1 1 poses as a man to survive in the Old whom she saves from lynching. By this time, Greenwald's not just undercutting long-held myths about frontier morals, but presenting goodness in the Old West as emanating from a static series of concentric circles of purity, with the violated and oft-beaten foreigner at the martyr's center; the white woman forced to disguise her own gender to live with dignity on the next ring outward; followed by the ignorant, bigoted miners and as the all-consuming embodiment of evil the patriarchal and tyrannical landed gentry that poisons all it comes across.

Only Amis' character is fully realized, but she carries the film on her back; it works best when it is chronicling the indomitable spirit of this single, profoundly courageous woman. And even after the pedantic lag of the second half, Greenwald finishes on a crackling high note, when the long-hidden secret is finally revealed. They don't make Westerns like this anymore. Come to think of it, they never did. ffflillilwiil tai PRESIDIO THEATRES PRESIDIO THEATRES I 1 umnu cMfku PRESIDIO THEATRES See It With A Bud 8 0 GRAMERCY Fit i' i 71 A GRAMERCY PICTUffiS RElEASf UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, MC.

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