Hidalgo

Viggo Mortensen stars as a Pony Express rider who takes the challenge of a 3,000-mile race across the deserts of the Middle East. Epic tale from John Fusco, writer of Thunderheart, and Joe Johnston, director of Jurassic Park 3
It's easy to be harsh about Hidalgo. It heartily adopts traditional mythologies of the old West, with a hero in the form of Viggo Mortensen's lonesome cowboy Frank Hopkins, while simultaneously taking the Dances With Wolves route in its treatment of Native Americans. Complicating matters, it also takes its Wild West hero to the Middle East.

Scratch the surface of this adventure yarn and a variety of potentially dubious subtexts could be exposed: key among them is the idea of an American heading to the Middle East to, effectively, conquer.

Furthermore, many have been up in arms about Disney's assertion that the film is "Based on the life of Frank Hopkins". Islamic academics have said that the race across the Arabian Peninsula presented in the film is itself a complete fabrication. (Even in geographical terms a 3,000 mile race from Yemen to Syria is ludicrous.)

Some American academics have claimed that even the races Hopkins claimed to have been part of in the States never occurred. Hopkins also claimed to be half-Sioux. A Native American author and scholar has contested his claim. In fact, people seem to have put a lot of effort into discrediting almost everything Hopkins wrote about himself and almost everything presented about him in the film. (The film does include the postscript, "reputed").

It's a boggling situation as writer John Fusco, who scripted Brat Pack western Young Guns and animated feature Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron alongside his earnest look at FBI-Sioux relations Thunderheart, is reputed to have spent 12 years researching and writing the screenplay. Having said all of that, it's hard to dislike the result if treated simply as a piece of handsome mainstream entertainment, especially when its leading man is Viggo Mortensen, fresh from achieving iconic status in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Mortensen might be nominally typecast - he speaks chunks of Sioux dialect, he rides across open planes, he's an introspective type - but he provides an effective focus for a story with epic dimensions. As for the fact or fiction debate - well, does anyone seriously think they're getting realism when they sit down to watch a Hollywood flick that starts with the words "Based on a true story"? More fool them.

Hopkins delivers a dispatch to the US soldiers at Wounded Knee in 1890. A massacre ensues, leaving him guilty and traumatised - a drunk reenacting (fabricating) US versus Indian events for Buffalo Bill Cody (Simmons).

As Cody touts him as the "world's great endurance horse and rider", Aziz (Alexi-Malle), an envoy from the Arab Sheikh Riyadh (Shariff), arrives to tell him to cease. The greatest such men, he says, are those riding the Sheik's thoroughbreds. Hopkins is invited to join a race - dubbed the "Ocean of Fire" - to prove himself. Considering most men die even taking part in this event "held annually for more than 1,000 years", it would seem pretty foolhardy. But Hopkins sees it as a means of performing a suitable contrition. Hopkins and his mustang (a wild horse descended from the horses of the Spanish) Hidalgo get a mixed reception in the Middle East: English aristocrat Anne Davenport (Lombard) flirts with him but is up to something dubious; Riyadh is a traditional man, but, as a reader of Wild West tales, friendly toward the American; other competitors aren't so warm. "Never before has a foreigner entered the great race" - and for many the entry of an "infidel" is considered "sacrilege". Still, the race gets underway regardless. And soon Hopkins and Hidalgo are roasting in the desert.

It's here that the storytelling - never mind the dubious representation of the Arabs - loses its footing most overtly. Fusco and Johnston, deciding that the concept of one man's wilful battle against the extraordinarily harsh environment wasn't dramatic enough, introduce subplots about brigands pursuing the Sheik's purebred horse. Trouble also comes with Davenport's attempts to seduce Hopkins or convince him to quit (so her horse can win), and, most elaborately, the Sheik's only surviving child, daughter Jazira (Robinson), both falling for our hero and getting kidnapped so he can rescue her.

The results are overwrought, and make the film overlong. But somehow the cliché of the individual not succumbing to fate (or even believing in it) but rather battling onwards through sheer force of will survives, again probably thanks to Mortensen's likeable qualities.
Verdict
A very difficult film due to its combination of questionable source material and dubious political implications. On a superficial level, as adventure fiction, it's pretty good, with Aragorn - sorry, Viggo - looking really rather splendid against a series of dramatic desert vistas.