Parents' Guide to Appaloosa

APPALOOSA has a number of things to recommend it -- Harris is an able director, the ensemble cast is first rate, and the story is based on a novel by best-selling author Robert B. Parker. (Parker is perhaps best known for the Spenser private eye series.) But unlike revisionist modern Westerns such as Unforgiven and The Proposition, Appaloosa is a classic, old-fashioned, straightforward story -- good men and bad men, gunfights and stare-downs, long rides and short bursts of action.

That said, "straightforward" doesn't mean "simple"; there are some superbly acted moments in Appaloosa. As Bragg, Irons starts out as a grizzled lunatic, but as the storyline progresses, he becomes more civilized, more charming ... and more dangerous. Zellweger's newly arrived piano-playing mystery woman is prim and proper, but she's also got a fairly fluid sense of allegiance. Even the easy, gruff interplay between Cole and Hicks is full of shifts and unspoken truths, and Harris and Mortensen settle into playing two lifelong friends as if they were exactly that, while still holding the screen in their individual scenes. Like many classic Westerns, Appaloosa takes a hard look at what's gained -- and what's lost -- as the frontier becomes part of civilization and how the many people who shaped and settled the American West struggled to create a civilized community that had no more use for them. Beautifully shot, full of action, and far richer than it seems to be at first glance, Appaloosa is a welcome reminder of why Westerns matter on the big screen.