Rust, review – Halyna Hutchins gave Alec Baldwin's cursed western more beauty than it deserves

Telegraph

6 days ago

Every film becomes a séance eventually, but Rust made the transition quicker than most. This sombre, workmanlike western lit up with notoriety four years ago after its 42-year-old director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, was fatally shot on set. The bullet, which also wounded the film's director Joel Souza, came from a gun that was being used as a prop, and which was fired by its star, Alec Baldwin, during preparations for a scene. In the ensuing trial, the film's armourer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter; Baldwin was acquitted and the same charge dismissed on procedural grounds.
That awful, avoidable accident is why a large portion of Rust's audience will have heard of the film at all; it's why I'm writing about it, and probably why you're reading about it, too. There's a ghoulishness to this, which is human. But equally human, I think, is the deeper, warmer desire to appreciate the last work of an artist who would have never conceived of it as such, and must have assumed she was just getting started. (Hutchins had served as director of photography on just five fairly minor features in the four years before she made Rust.)
It's hard not to suspect that the film's lengthy running time – two hours and 20 minutes is unusual for an independent western without much of a pedigree – is the result of a desire to showcase as much of Hutchins' best work as was possible. (Two years after her death, the further month of filming required to complete the film was overseen by her friend and fellow cinematographer Bianca Cline.)
That would certainly explain the film's patient, plaintive and pointedly beautiful opening: two shining close-ups of Baldwin and his young co-star Patrick Scott McDermott's eyes (very Sergio Leone), followed by a series of shots of dawn-pink clouds rolling tenderly across the vast western landscapes, then a proper introduction to McDermott's Lucas Hollister, a careworn 13-year-old orphan, as he wraps up warm for the morning farmyard chores while firelight caresses his face.
It's Lucas on whom the film centres, as after an accidental shooting (grim irony), the boy is sentenced to death, then sprung from jail at the 11th hour by his outlaw grandfather, Baldwin's Harland Rust. Films made on this scale often require a Baldwin-level name to attract enough funding to be made in the first place, but the 30 Rock star isn't a natural fit for this grizzled and stoical role: he has the sort of face which knows a well-poured Martini when it sees one, and doesn't quite belong in the rickety saloons of 19th-century Wyoming Territory.
The plot, co-written by Souza and Baldwin, toggles soap-operatically between the flight of Lucas and his grandfather for the US-Mexico border and the efforts of Josh Hopkins' sheriff and his rag-tag posse to thwart their escape. It's methodically told, but often ravishingly captured. A simple riverside conversation between Baldwin and McDermott is shot with a split diopter: a vintage lens attachment which lets actors on opposite sides of the frame appear in focus simultaneously, even though one is deep in the background and the other nearby. Rust is stippled with such flourishes; in any other circumstances, they'd feel a little too good for the film in which they appear. In this one, however, they're the reason we're here at all.
15 cert, 140 min. On digital platforms from June 23