Wednesday Western: 'The Old Way' (2023)

“It wasn’t in the script for the trigger to be pulled,” said George Stephanopoulus.

"Well, the trigger wasn't pulled," replied Alec Baldwin. “I didn't pull the trigger.”

“So you never pulled the trigger?” asked Stephanopoulus.

“Oh no, no, no,” Baldwin insisted. “I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them — never.”

The character Colton Briggs weeps through the body of Nicolas Cage. His brokenness is palpable, as he and his daughter confront the realities of death.

It was a fabrication so bold that even Stephanopoulus saw through it. The interview was huge news at the time: an exclusive with Baldwin a month and a half after the shooting on the set of the Western “Rust.”

A preventable death

Baldwin had been mostly silent. Or at least he didn’t give any interviews. We’d become acquainted with the photos of him sobbing on the set after the tragic accident.

We’ll get into the entire story in a future entry. For now, what matters is that a 24-year-old named Hannah Gutierrez was the armorer for “Rust.” That meant she was responsible for all of the guns on the set, including the replica Colt .45 that Baldwin haphazardly fired, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Hannah Gutierrez had been fast-tracked to the position, thanks to her highly connected stepdad. “Rust” was only her second movie as an armorer. Her first was the Nicolas Cage film “The Old Way."

She had raised red flags during filming. On two occasions, she fired a gun near cast members without warning. The second time, Cage shouted, “Make an announcement! You just blew my f***ing eardrums out!” then stormed off the set.

Shortly after the film wrapped, Gutierrez appeared on the “Voices of the West” podcast, crowing that “The Old Way” was a “really badass way” to launch her Hollywood career. She also described the process of loading ammo as “the scariest thing.”

The fatal shooting on the set of "Rust" was a little more than a month away.

She added: “You know, I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready, but, doing it, like, it went really smoothly. The best part about my job is just showing people who are normally kind of freaked out by guns how safe they can be and how they’re not really problematic unless put in the wrong hands.”

Do you believe that anything happens without the will of God?

Cage begins “The Old Way,” his first Western, with a whopper of mustache.

Oddly, the film is exactly what you would expect from a low-budget Western from 2023 starring Nicolas Cage. To make it all the weirder, you can find it on Disney+.

Right out of the gate, we’ve got a man struggling to escape a noose as a preacher delivers a sermon, declaring, “Do you believe that anything happens without the will of God?”

Ominous figures loom in the shadows.

Cage plays Colton Briggs, a gunfighter who has to avenge his wife, and he’ll have to team up with his 12-year-old daughter to do it. This journey will bring them to — ah, what am I saying, none of this is interesting or new.

This movie is trash. I mean, it’s great to have on in the background. It’s relaxing. But it’s basically a hodgepodge of Western archetypes and tropes.

The centerpiece of the film is the father-daughter relationship. But Cage has played better fathers. Check out his performance in the suprisingly good animated film "The Croods" and its sequel.

The critical response to “The Old Way” seems apathetic and cold until you watch the movie.

The New York Times review is probably the most savage:

"The Old Way" is a cheap, run-of-the-mill western, which is an appealing quality … with Nicolas Cage sleepwalking through his role as the ruthless Montana cowboy Colton Briggs, roused from gunslinging retirement by a lackluster quest for revenge. … It’s a distinctly low-effort affair across the board, from the simplistic plotting (our heroes chase the bad guys, then find them) to Cage’s performance, absent any of the self-aware wit he demonstrated in last year's "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent." And while it’s true that a certain tepid aspect is common to most B westerns, those of the ’30s and ’40s were made with a baseline competence that "The Old Way" is woefully lacking.

Where you can find it

Disney+

Hulu

Amazon Prime - $3.99

Google Play - $3.99

AppleTV - $5.99

But still …

First, come on, guys, this is Nicolas Cage.

Second, the reviewers are absolutely right.

And, third, they’re also being lazy. “The Old Way” isn’t entirely awful. The cinematography is gorgeous; the sets are huge and elaborate.

But “The Old Way” wouldn’t appear in this series without Cage at its core. It’s a mediocre film, full of stereotypes and tropes that were maybe never original to begin with. It lacks the creative brilliance, the psychedelic flourishes that cascade throughout “Slow West” (2015), not to mention the special effects and storytelling.

The music resembles an AI attempt at a generic Western soundtrack. The plot is equally stilted and uneventful. The dialogue is paunchy and awkward — Cage flatly rushes his lines for much of the movie, while some of the other actors get too dramatic. Which is not their fault: The characters are uninspired. The themes are broad.

But with Nicolas Cage holding the reins , these failures are trifling or at least amusing.

Nouveau shamanic

People are drawn to Nic Cage because he delivers a costumed, ornamental version of Nic Cage. Nobody else talks or scowls or laughs like he does, the king of reaction shots. His career has all the variety of a mid-range buffet, a magnet for hangovers.

He has delivered some objectively stellar performances — “Adaptation” (2002), “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), and “Raising Arizona” (1987).

But his cinematic mastery involves far more than great acting in the traditional sense. His prolific career, consisting of more than 100 movies, resembles a waterfall of brilliance and spam.

He played Benjamin Franklin Gates in the “National Treasure” series. He is Ghost Rider. Can you imagine any other actor being able to shape-shift so dramatically?

He doesn’t always make this transformation. Sometimes, in “The Old Way” for instance, he seems to phone it in. But even this is a spectacle worth beholding. You still get to watch Nicolas Cage navigate his craft, even if the movie is a stinker.

New York Times magazine described him as “Hollywood’s greatest surrealist, whose personal and creative unpredictability has led him to attain near-mythological status in certain corners of the internet.”

He’s so iconic that he has his own style of acting: nouveau shamanic, a process of surrender that Cage views as an authentic alternative to the traditional method of acting, which he views as deception: “I don’t act. I feel and I imagine and I channel.”

The goal of nouveau shamanic is to follow impulses. This wildness of heart and eagerness to explore the depths of the subconscious mind resonate with iconic director David Lynch, who characterized Cage as "the jazz musician of American acting."

Ethan Hawke has lauded Cage’s ingenuity, describing him as "the only actor since Marlon Brando that's actually done anything new with the art of acting."

Nouveau shamanic often results in “mega-acting,” an approach that some viewers and critics have interpreted as showy overacting. This assumption is a mistake. It forswears the possibility of a kind of cinematic enlightenment.

You can see it in Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” (2009). Cage let his inner turmoil spill into the derangement of an unhinged police lieutenant who spirals into drug abuse and corruption — of every kind.

In “Matchstick Men” (2003), he unleashed the painstaking impulses of a con artist stricken with OCD. Cage really lets the pathologies breathe.

Done with acting

Nic Cage is pure Hollywood. He credits James Dean with inspiring him to begin an acting career — without needing to mention the fact that his actual last name is Coppola, as in “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” and “American Graffiti.”

Cage has appeared in big-budget movies and no-budget movies and every level in between.

Here’s a typical Cage paradigm: He shuffles through highbrow and lowbrow, sometimes all at once. After winning an Oscar for his portrayal of a suicidal alcoholic writer in “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), he landed a string of empty yet lovable blockbusters.

They were all approximations of cinema. Pure blockbuster. Full of overacting done in total earnestness. We loved every moment of it. This string of films is now coded into the American experience.

He played gaudy characters, excessively makeupped and badly costumed. And he owned the big screen in the late 1990s — “The Rock” (1996), “Face/Off” (1997), “Con Air” (1997), “City of Angels” (1998), “Snake Eyes” (1998), “8MM” (1999), and who could forget his frantic yet cool appearance in “Gone in 60 Seconds” (2000)?

None of those films saw the slightest hint of critical acclaim.

It’s not until recently that his performances have earned him praise again. He has been sharp, with “Mandy” (2018), “Pig” (2021), and “Dream Scenario” (2023), all of which are lower-budget endeavors by independent production companies with lots of clout, including highbrow darling A24, which distributed “Dream Scenario."

In the “Western Movies Today” episode of the “How the West Was Cast” podcast, co-host Andrew Patrick Nelson points out that modern Westerns are made largely as passion projects and often with the intent of winning awards.

Compare this to the Western at its height, when over a hundred Westerns came out each year. In that same period, none of them won Best Picture. Westerns only really started winning Oscars after the genre had supposedly collapsed.

“The Old Way” doesn’t quite fit either paradigm, but for good reason.

I know I've disparaged the film for most of this article, but “The Old Way” does have at least one standout moment of cinematic brilliance.

An hour into the movie, there’s this lovely campfire scene. The setting is reminiscent of the powerful scene in “True Grit” (1969), when Rooster finally tells Mattie his story.

Briggs faces his daughter, surrounded by night, and unburdens his sorrow, the loss of his true love, crying for the first time. And the tears are genuine. The character Colton Briggs weeps through the body of Nicolas Cage. His brokenness is palpable, as he and his daughter confront the realities of death.

It’s the fullest example we get of Cage’s acting method. It’s just enough to inspire hope that there will be more Nicolas Cage Westerns in the future.

Late last year, Cage told Vanity Fair that he was done with acting: “I may have three or four more movies left in me.”

He said that after appearing in six films — some of his best work to date — in 2023 alone.

He has also since appeared in three additional films, including “Longlegs” (2024), with another three in various stages of production, including “The Gunslingers,” his second Western.

Still, it’s hard to forget what he said to Vanity Fair: ”I do feel I’ve said what I’ve had to say with cinema. I think I took film performance as far as I could. … I do want to get much more severe and stringent in my selection process. … I want to say ‘Bye’ on a high note.”

But who knows?

Who knows where Nicolas Cage’s performance starts and ends, how far it extends beyond the spectacle and mania of his presence on screen? Who knows if there are even limits to what he feels and channels and imagines?