The Shooting

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
A film for LemonJello:
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Will-Hutchins/dp/B00004W5VE

When last did you hear a Western described as "Beckettian"?

I'd be keen to discuss the ending with anyone who's seen it.

Cool. It's on my Netflix queue.

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
A film for LemonJello:
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Will-Hutchins/dp/B00004W5VE

When last did you hear a Western described as "Beckettian"?

I'd be keen to discuss the ending with anyone who's seen it.

Warning: this could be a spoiler if you haven't seen the movie.
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I watched the movie today. I can see why it is a cult classic.

It's left me with a lot of questions regarding what really happened and where all the characters' interests really lay. Here are just some of them:

For starters, why was Gashade chalking his path home, which seemed to allow the woman to follow him? And where was Gashade, and by extension the woman, coming from? It appears not to be Winslow -- his first discussion with Coley indicates this and, anyway, otherwise Gashade probably would have known about the incident there. This raises another question because if the woman had ties to the incident (perhaps the man and "could've been a child" were her family, which would explain why she was after Coin), then why would she not be coming from Winslow, the site of the incident?

For two, who killed Leland? Perhaps it was the bearded man who then tracked Coin to Crosstree and left word in the form of letter there for the woman? But if that were the case, then how did the woman even know to go to Crosstree? If the bearded man were another hitman hired by the woman to follow Coin, then it would probably have just been a matter of happenstance from their perspective that Coin went through Crosstree. Maybe there aren't that many towns around where Coin could have run to and they predicted his going through there?

Also, just how many hitman did the woman hire? There was Billy Spears; she would have liked to hire Gashade in that capacity; and then was the bearded man another hitman? I'm not sure about the bearded man: I guess he tracked Coin to Crosstree, then tracked him from there, he presumably met up with Coin where Gashade et al found two sets of tracks, and then the bearded man's broken leg and broken state could have indicated some fight with Coin. The fact that the woman considered the bearded man "a friend" would indicate that his intentions toward Coin were probably not friendly.

I think I understand all of Gashade's actions and intentions (provided that he came around to the understanding that they were tracking Coin), including his desire that Coley go on the trek.

As far as the ending, it's not clear to me who died immediately from the shooting, but it seemed they were all pretty much sentenced to death from heat exhaustion and dehydration in any case.

I would probably need to watch it again to see if I could catch more details.

I thought the whole movie smacked of Camus and also Sartre and the existentialists.

Originally posted by LemonJello
It's left me with a lot of questions regarding what really happened and where all the characters' interests really lay.

No kidding.

A couple of my own:
Why was the killer so loyal to the Woman that he followed her to almost certain death? Unusual behaviour for a hired gun. It must be love.

Why, for the love of Mike, did the Woman keep shooting her horses?

There's a question formulating around Coley's disturbing innocence, although I'm not quite sure what it is. But I think he dies because he's innocent.

Of course it would be nice to know what Coin & Gashay were doing in the camp to start off with, since they don't look like minors to me.

The bearded man seems for all the world like an inverted Godot. His turn to do the waiting.

I don't blame Coin for taking off if he knew the Woman was coming...

On another note, I admire the sort of filming that keeps you going through a film without a plot. Kind of like the Man With No Name...