FILM REVIEW

WALKER Directed by Alex Cox

by Rusty Piedmonte,  Arts & Letters Weekly (Phlogiston, PA), Oct. 20, 1987

There is a strain of historical filmmaking that mistakes distance for seriousness: costumes, dust, and a studied reluctance to connect past to present except by implication. Alex Cox’s Walker does not have that problem. It proceeds instead by collapse: 1850 bleeds into 1987; not metaphorically, it is a fact of continuity. 

Cox has always been a disruptive filmmaker, but this is a different scale of wager. The earlier films announce their irreverence; Walker sustains it. Nicaragua is rendered as both period space and occupied present, and Cox refuses to resolve the contradiction. Helicopters appear on the horizon. English is spoken with a flat, contemporary cadence. The effect is surreal but this is not surrealism. He sees history as something that is uncontained; that leaks. He refuses the concept of history as museum.

The performance at the center (Ed Harris as William Walker) is appropriately opaque. Harris does not search for psychological access here.  He firmly holds position: calm, certain, faintly abstracted from consequence. The film builds around that stillness. Walker is not explained, which is the point; explanation would reduce him to motive when the film is concerned with permission.

What is most striking is Cox’s control of tone. The material invites satire, and the film permits it in flashes, but it does not settle there. Nor does it claim the gravity of prestige historical drama. It moves laterally between registers, sometimes abruptly, but with a consistent logic: each shift denies the viewer a stable moral vantage point. One is not allowed the comfort of distance or the clarity of identification.

The political argument is explicit—perhaps too explicit for some—but it is also structurally embedded. The film’s anachronisms are not decorative; they are its organizing principle. By collapsing temporal distance, Cox collapses moral alibis. The past is not past, and the mechanisms on display are not aberrations.

There are limits. The film’s discursiveness occasionally outruns its images, and certain gestures land as assertions rather than discoveries. But this is the cost of the attempt. Walker is a large, unstable construction, and its instabilities are inseparable from its force.

Cox has made a film that declines good behavior. It is all the better for it.

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WALKER, directed by Alex Cox, written by Rudy Wurlitzer; director of photography, David Bridges; film editors, Carlos Puente Ortega and Mr. Cox; music by Joe Strummer; production designer, Bruno Rubeo; produced by Lorenzo O'Brien; a Universal Picture. Starring: Ed Harris, Richard Masur, Rene Auberjonois, Keith Szarabajka, Sy RichardsonRated R. Running time: 90 minutes.