Gunfighter Paradise (Water, 2024)

The hardest films to review are not the ones a critic dislikes but the ones he doesn’t get.

When the reaction is antipathy, an honest critic can usually pinpoint specific reasons for it. When the response is affinity, there is usually no difficulty in enumerating the formal features that please the viewer. But when a film misses completely, there is little to write about except the reaction. And I have always found reviews that are about the critic’s reaction rather than about the film the prompted the reaction to be marginally less interesting and seriously less helpful.

So what is a critic to do with a film like Gunfighter Paradise? He can insist that the film itself is incomprehensible, alienating those who both made it or liked it. He can report that the film did not land for him while acknowledging that he understands it did so for others. That’s usually my response to films by, say, David Lynch or Terence Malick. That only works, of course, if the filmmaker has a track record of endorsements from peers and viewers. As my friend Russell Lucas once said at Arts & Faith, if there is recognized greatness, it is the critic’s job to at least try to find it.

Absent a critical consensus, a reviewer can do well to listen carefully to the artists themselves. The teacher in me thinks I have graded enough papers to be able to distinguish between a writer who is “out there” from one who is simply babbling. Here’s what writer/director Jethro Waters has to say about this film:

GUNFIGHTER PARADISE is a semi-autobiographical dark comedy. This film is an exploration of an ever-expanding American psychosis – the results of a century’s worth of building a Frankenstein out of conflicting American spiritual and nationalistic ideologies. The world of GUNFIGHTER PARADISE is a world where our neighbors have become the other.

Gunfighter Paradise — Press Kit

I honestly have no idea what that means. If you do, you might get more from the film than I did. Even a plot summary sounds deliberately opaque. A hunter returns to his home with a mysterious green case. (Is this a Pulp Fiction reference?) He starts hearing voices. Is he a divine? Is he crazy? Given that the plot synopsis provided by the film says that his mind is “deteriorating,” I guess we are supposed to think that he is losing his sanity, so perhaps there is a comment here about how indistinguishable the insane are from the normal?

Maybe if I squint and try real hard I see a superficial resemblance to…Flannery O’Connor? There are religious motifs, a Southern setting, eccentric characters, and bizarre plot points. O’Connor’s stories, though (absent maybe Wise Blood) have their eccentricities offset by enough normal people and places that one never feels as though the exaggeration has been pushed past the point of recognition. I may never have met people exactly like The Misfit or Hazel Motes or Tom Shitflet, but I’ve met enough people close enough to them to understand their origins. The characters here have names like “The Neighbor,” “The Mother,” “The Brother,” and “Confederate Soldier #2.” Are they caricatures so extreme that their strangeness is a signal we are stuck in the narrator’s “deteriorating mind”? There are plenty of films about people who may or may not be going crazy — A Beautiful Mind, Vertigo, Fight Club — that I suspect there has to be more of a point here than “is he or isn’t he crazy?”

But if there is, I couldn’t figure it out. If you think you know, feel free to leave a comment. I’m not here to trash any artist who has enough of a vision to get a film made. I just can’t praise a film that I don’t understand.