The Shooting

In the American West, former bounty hunter Willet Gashade, and his dimwitted partner Coley Boyard, are approached by a secretive young woman who offers them money to guide her through the desert but refuses to discuss why she is traveling. The group is joined on their journey by a dangerous gunslinger named Billy Spear, who the woman has also hired. Out in the endless wastes of the desert, the question of why will determine all of their fates.

The Shooting—not to be confused with The Shootist—is a film financed by Roger Corman and hardly released in America. Starring Warren Oates and Jack Nicholson, it is an existential western about two miners who agree to guide a strange woman, and her mad dog pet gunman, into the desert on a quest for bloody revenge.

Right off the bat, it’s fair to say this isn’t a typical Western, at least, not in comparison to the American Myth Machines that we more commonly see, or to the deconstructed examinations of that cruel era in American history that came later. Basically, if you’re looking for a more familiar shoot’em up, then you should look elsewhere.

The Shooting is more like a fever dream. It is an unexpectedly arty Western, a confusing and surreal journey across an empty desert wilderness, punctuated by sudden bouts of brutality and violence.

Featuring the kind of quirky hard-boiled dialogue that you might find in an old 50s noir, or in the indie crime dramas of the 90s, the characters here are all untraditional archetypes, surprisingly almost quirky, each one a gravel-in-the-gut and spit-in-the-eye type on the surface, who will then turn around and reveal how scared and unsure they are underneath, which is fascinating and surprising stuff.

As for the vaunted ending mentioned on the poster?

I mean, I guess it makes sense? Kinda. But also, because I had no idea it was even something to expect, it was mostly just confusing, and then afterwards, I was stuck trying to figure out what happened before I remembered an important part earlier in the film, and once I did… all possible meaning immediately evaporated. I have no idea what happened here in the ending, not really. I get the base facts, but the meaning?

Nope.

Honestly, I am unsure if the characters were even alive for most of this film. Is the journey a metaphor? Are the characters? Of what? I assume purgatory, but that seems too obvious, and also doesn’t clear things up any. Director Monte Hellman made Two Lane Blacktop, which I love, and it’s maybe laudable that The Shooting someone has even less interest in coherence than that film does. Oates is great, and so is Nicholson. Jack puts so much pure casual menace into the character, it’s just fantastic. In fact, after seeing this performance, I wonder if Walter Goggins maybe studied the character, because I can see some echoes.

Anyway, The Shooting was a challenging and weird film, but also, I think, a film that is worth checking out.