IT’S HAMER TIME
The Highwaymen tells story of man who gunned down Bonnie and Clyde
When Warner Bros. released the film Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, the widow and son of Texas Ranger Frank Hamer sued the studio for defamation of character, citing the historically inaccurate portrayal of the couple’s killer as a jealous bungler.
The studio settled out of court, but The Highwaymen, which begins streaming on Netflix Friday, seems determined to further right that wrong with a sympathetic portrayal of Hamer (Kevin Costner) and fellow Ranger Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson). The film barely shows the notorious outlaws except when Bonnie Parker turns a wounded police officer over with her foot so he can see as she shoots him in the face.
Costner has been here before — recall his role taking down Al Capone as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables (1987).
The Highwaymen is set in 1934. Texas prisons chief Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), stung by a breakout engineered by Clyde Barrow, suggests putting Hamer on the case.
He then recruits Gault, and the pair’s odd-couple banter — the taciturn Hamer and the gregarious, hard-drinking (and oft-peeing) Gault — is the best thing in this prettily shot period piece from director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks). The Great Depression never looked so lovely.
Unfortunately, that’s not enough to carry the weight of this two-hour-and-12-minute slog through several states and long weeks of investigation. The duo gets little help from the FBI, which is determined to bring down the Barrow gang with newfangled technology — car radios, wiretaps — and no help from outsiders. But Hamer succeeds the old-fashioned way, through perseverance, intimidating witnesses and his conviction that “outlaws always come home.”
John Fusco’s script provides a corrective to popular culture, which still tends to glamorize two people who killed at least nine police officers and several civilians, and who in spite of their Robin Hood mythos liked to pick on small stores and rural gas stations.
But in pushing back on the pendulum he seems to have forgotten that this is still entertainment and not a history lesson. In one of several extended monologues designed to illuminate the characters, Hamer visits Barrow’s father and tells about how, as a teenager, he gave up plans to attend a seminary after killing a man who had once shot him.
The elder Barrow stops him: “How come you telling me all this?”
He wasn’t the only one wondering.