Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp was issued, starring Kevin Costner. The movie cost some $65 million, but only brought in about $25 million. (The previous year Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell, proved ffar more successful, bringing in a surprising $55 million). The following is the New York Times review of the Costner film:WHENEVER Wyatt Earp experiences a dark night of the soul -- which happens more than once in Lawrence Kasdan's and Kevin Costner's 3-hour-and-10-minute epic -- you can bet it will be a dark and stormy night outside, too. At a turning point in the story that takes Wyatt from the Iowa cornfields of his boyhood to old age, he lies in a jail cell.
He is a sweaty, dirty, drunken young man who doesn't blink when a giant bug crawls across his chest. And to make sure no one misses the point, there is rain and thunder and lightning, not to mention some fancy movie lighting that allows Mr. Costner's All-American face to be seen clearly among the shadows. Visually and thematically, this version of Wyatt Earp's life may be the darkest ever put on screen.
The film's symbolic darkness is part of its vast, strong ambition. Mr. Costner's Wyatt Earp is a man tortured by the pull between two types of justice: the lawful kind that first made him a deputy sheriff and the frontier kind that turned him into a cold-blooded murderer seeking vengeance for his younger brother's death. His great and mordant friend Doc Holliday (spectacularly played by Dennis Quaid) describes him as "a marshal and an outlaw, the best of both worlds."
That is a great concept, but the film's literal-minded approach to the hero's dark soul is one of its terrible problems. "Wyatt Earp" labors to turn this mythic figure into a complex man; instead it makes him a cardboard cutout and his story a creepingly slow one.
In a typical scene, Wyatt disarms an out-of-control man and suddenly finds himself a deputy in Dodge City, Kan. A tin star is pinned on him; Mr. Costner touches it dramatically; James Newton Howard's overripe music swells. Time and again, watching "Wyatt Earp" is like being hit in the head with the butt of a rifle for no good reason at all.
Along the way, though, the film has episodes that almost live up to its ambition. They come from a parade of minor characters far more lifelike than Wyatt himself. The story, which is as much about family loyalty as it is about heroism and the Old West, gives Gene Hackman another chance to show he can do anything. As Nicholas Earp, the patriarch, he brings his grandiose lines down to earth. "Nothing counts so much as blood," he says with biblical certainty while sitting at the head of the dinner table. "The rest is just strangers."
Wyatt and his brothers will live by that code as Western lawmen. But before then Wyatt has to make it through his youth, first as a buffalo hunter and then as a married man. Much time is spent depicting his courtship and idyllic marriage to his first wife, Urilla (Annabeth Gish). But she exists here mostly so she can die of typhoid, in Wyatt's arms, providing him with his everlasting tortured soul.
After Urilla's death, Wyatt hits bottom, becoming a thief and landing in that jail. His father bails him out and talks some sense into him. Then he becomes a recovering alcoholic. Though the film never uses the anachronistic term, it is there in anachronistic spirit; Wyatt is forever walking into saloons and pointedly getting a cup of coffee.
Soon several Earp brothers have joined Wyatt in Dodge: the level-headed marshal, Virgil (Michael Madsen); the addled-by-drink bartender, James (David Andrews); the hot-headed deputy, Morgan (Linden Ashby).
As Doc Holliday, Mr. Quaid is the finest of Wyatt's cohorts, and not only because he has lost 40 pounds to achieve the gaunt look of a man dying of tuberculosis. He frowns and looks out at the world from under the brim of his black hat with a cool, sardonic gaze. When he meets the film's hero, he says in a slow voice dripping with the scent of magnolias, "Have you evuh been to Georgia, Wyatt Earp?" The former dentist, by then known as a notorious killer, describes himself deliciously as "a sporting man."
Yet a film that tries so hard to offer intelligent entertainment too often forgets to entertain. The famous showdown in Tombstone, Ariz., with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday facing the cattle-rustling Clanton gang, is staged with greater historical accuracy than usual. It is not set at the O.K. Corral, but on an open street. Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan and Doc walk in a row through the dusty town, and take part in a brief, bloody gunfight at close range. One of the most famous scenes in all of Western legend is anti-climactic.
As in the Earp brothers' lives, women are functional in this film. Mare Winningham is Wyatt's pathetic, prostitute common-law second wife, Mattie. Joanna Going is his appealing, stylish third wife, Josie. JoBeth Williams gives whores a good name as James's feisty, sharp-tongued wife, Bessie. But poor Catherine O'Hara, as Virgil's wife, Allie, is stuck with the unnecessary, audience-nudging line: "You're a cold man, Wyatt Earp."
The screenplay was written by Dan Gordon and rewritten by Mr. Kasdan. But there is little of Mr. Kasdan's deft style in the script or the direction, which is so unlike that of his other films: "The Big Chill," "Body Heat" and, most conspicuously, his smart, light-handed western, "Silverado."
This earnest film does have Kevin Costner's fingerprints all over it. (He is one of its producers.) "You're not a deliberate man, Ed," Wyatt says in a monotone to his reasonable deputy, Ed Masterson (Bill Pullman). "I don't sense that about you. You're too affable." Only a fool would underestimate Mr. Costner's popularity in a period epic, but there isn't much to redeem this film at such softheaded moments, when it threatens to become "Dances With Wyatt" or "Wyatt Earp: Prince of Marshals."
Here's the movie trailer:
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