Disney Stands Tall with `Tales'

directed by Jeremiah Chechik

starring Patrick Swayze, Oliver Platt,

Roger Aaron Brown and Nick Stahl

Walt Disney Pictures

Disney's "Tall Tale: The Unbelievable Adventures of Pecos Bill" is not a cartoon. But don't let that turn you off of this worthwhile adventure. It's 1905, somewhere in the American West, and Daniel Hackett (Nick Stahl) is chafing against life on his family's farm. "I hate this farm! It's just a dried-up, miserable piece of land!" he yells to his father, Jonas (Stephen Lang, looking like he just wandered in from a Biblical movie).

But to Jonas it means much more. When creepy railroad tycoon J.P. Stiles (Scott Glenn) offers the towns people $50 an acre for their land, only Jonas stands up to question the shady deal. Stiles' thugs hunt him down and shoot him, but Jonas manages to pass the deed to the farm on to his son. Miserable, Daniel runs out to the family boat and cries himself to sleep. Obviously, the Hacketts are farmers and not sailors since the gentle bobbing of the boat unlaces the feebly-tied mooring rope, setting Daniel adrift down the river.

The next thing he knows, he has landed, Dorothy-like, in an entirely different world. Somehow Daniel's boat has washed up onto a vast plain of parched earth, with not a drop of water in sight. It's Patrick Swayze as Pecos Bill, and not Glinda the Good Witch, who arrives in a cyclone, just in time to rescue Daniel from two comically imbecilic vagrants poised to kill Daniel for his gold fillings.

At first, Pecos Bill seems hopelessly macho. "I'm pecos Bill; I can shoot straighter, ride faster, and drink harder than any man alive," he boasts. His horse indulges in gratuitous rearing and is named Widowmaker. Luckily, Pecos is more than just the embodiment of testosterone-identified values. After a little initial prickliness between them ("Stay away from my horse, or he'll kill you"), Pecos decides to help Daniel save his farm and his family. On their way, they round up some other legendary figures: Paul Bunyan (Oliver Platt) and John Henry (Roger Aaron Brown).

Bunyan, once the greatest logger of them all, and his emotionally delicate cobalt-blue ox, Babe, have fled from the industrialization of logging in the Northwest to the California redwoods. Swathed in fringed and beaded leather, his beard tied with a thong and the ensemble topped with a fur hat, he resembles a strange kind of bear. His hilarious bouts of self-pity and childishness make Bunyan the perfect counterpart to his more serious companions.

John Henry is the quintessential railroad builder. We first see him competing against a spike-driving machine. Standing on a rock above the crowd, he laughs confidently in the face of their disbelief at his prowess. Thankfully, Henry, as one of the few black popular legends, is neither a politically correct icon nor a cardboard character, drained of his ethnicity. He is one of the group, yet with his own story. When Henry talks with Daniel about father-son relationships, he speaks wistfully of his own father, sold downriver because he was a slave.

The nefarious Stiles still needs the Hackett farm in order to make his diabolical plan for a railroad complete. Although Stiles is in many ways the typical villain, he has several faces; all of them are absolutely evil. As a former hired gun, he is a twisted version of the self-made man. His current executive position and gold-lined office parallel him to the "robber barons" of the industrial age, like Carnegie, Morgan and RockefeD. In one eerie scene, Stiles taunts Daniel with words from an argument he could not possibly have heard. "That farm is just a dried-up, miserable piece of land!" he hisses, as if he is Daniel's own dark side. When Stiles finally corners Daniel and his legendary friends, Daniel must face the same choice as his father: is the land worth dying for?

The best part about this movie are the wonderful dynamics between the three "tall tale" heroes. They from a triumvirate whose role alters in the context of each scene. They are the guardians of the land, and of a dying way of life. In a bar, a simple toast with mugs of beer becomes a mystic ritual, the personifications of the West (Pecos Bill), the South (John Henry) and the North (Paul Bunyan) saluting each other solemnly. They are also role models and surrogate fathers to Daniel. The heroes teach him to be self-sufficient, but in the end they are also there to help him out.

For once Disney has mostly succeeded in the game of subtlety, addressing tensions between the environment and industry. The three tall tale-ers have been living outside of modern progress. They stand bewildered in the face of encroaching industrialization. When Pecos hears about inventions like the telegraph and the light bulb, he is incredulous. "You're telling me a tall tale," he says to Daniel. With horror, Paul and John try to imagine a world run by machines.

Although the "savage in a strange land" scenario is a little old, the corresponding environmental messages is not too overstated. "Maybe I'm just old fashioned," says Paul Bunyan bitterly, "but in my day we didn't kill the land; we just borrowed from it." More than the script, director Jeremiah Chechik relies on the gorgeous scenery of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and California. These make a powerful silent plea for environmental conservation.

"Tall Tale" is a surprisingly good live-action Disney movie. It incorporates several different themes, and its characters are fairly complex and wellplayed. The movie's greatest weakness is the father-son story line. The portrayal of Daniel's relationship with his father is strained (mostly by Lang's poor acting) and cliched. You may want to come in late and miss the first 20 minutes, which lay out the frame-work for the movie but fail to lend new life to an old theme.

It's Daniel's adventures with Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan and John Henry that make this movie a good time. "Tall Tale" is the perfect study break. Not only is it capable of entertaining you and your small friends from Mission Hill, there's enough intelligent material to keep you from riding out of the theater and into the sunset.