I’m Your Huckleberry

I’ve been running this site for a while and it surprised me to realize I’d never actually talked about Tombstone, the 1993 Western action epic that, really, is just a showcase for the acting talents of Val Kilmer. With the recent passing of Kilmer, many online have been going back to look at his filmography and rewatch the many gems the actor starred in, from his early comedic roles in Top Secret! and Real Genius, to his scene stealing role as Iceman in Top Gun, and then his dramatic turn as lead singer Jim Morrison in The Doors. But it was certainly Tombstone that cemented the actor, for many, as one of the greatest character actors of a generation.

It’s funny because you can tell Hollywood was never really comfortable having the actor as a background or supporting role. He was a very handsome man, with leading star looks, but the actor always seemed uncomfortable in lead roles. He had to bury himself in a character, stop being Val Kilmer and become someone else. The times where he just had to play a guy, and not someone weird or kooky, always felt like the blandest version of his performance, like he just wasn’t interested in the role. Batman Forever is a key example, with Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne / Batman being the least interesting character on screen, and you can tell that Kilmer knows it. He hated being in that film, and was reportedly not the best to work with, which is why they replaced him with George Cloony for Batman & Robin which, honestly, ended up being a big win for Kilmer (and a big loss for Clooney).

Kilmer certainly reached his peak of performance in Tombstone, elevating the real life character of Doc Holliday into scenery-chewing feat of pure acting. The second he comes on screen, he lights up the film, stealing all attention away from anything else going on. While the film is about Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), and Kilmer’s Holliday is meant to be support for Earp, backing him up and letting the leading man do the work, Kilmer can never really let himself slide into the background. His performance is too tuned, too all-encompassing, that the film never really works unless Holliday is around. It’s Wyatt Earp’s story, but it’s really Doc Holliday’s film, all because of Val Kilmer.

The film starts with Wyatt Earp (Russell) moving to the town of Tombstone with his brothers, Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), so they can go into business together. Earp spent years as a lawman but now wants a quieter life away from it all. There they meet with Wyatt’s long-time friend, Doc Holliday, who was in Arizona to get into a drier climate to ease the symptoms of his worsening tuberculosis. The Earps land a stake in a gambling establishment, with a little help from Holliday, and they settle into a life that should be easy… were it not for the Cowboys.

A gang of ruffians riding roughshod across the west, the Cowboys take what they want and shoot anyone that gets in their way, and when they cross with Wyatt Earp they find someone very much in their way. Wyatt wants them to leave town, but they refuse, and after a few heated exchanges a gunfight breaks out and Wyatt’s brother Morgan is killed. This causes Earp to take up the badge again so he can ride out for some (sanctioned) justice. And at his back rides his best friend, Doc Holliday, ready to help out his buddy one last time.

Tombstone is a simple film. Good guys come to town, meet bad guys. Bad guys are bad, forcing good guys to be good. Then there are some gunfights, a personal loss, more gunfights, and something of a win so the good guys can ride home and celebrate. It’s a simple story with a simple structure that, in all honesty, could have been told in 90 minutes or less, which is what makes the film’s two-hour-ten runtime feel so weird. It’s a bloated movie that easily could have been trimmed down and focused better, which would make it feel tighter and more interesting, but you also get the sense that between director George P. Cosmatos and lead Russell (who also reportedly did a lot of the directing himself) had so much material they loved that they couldn’t trim much of it out.

In fairness, the first two acts of the film are fairly tight. The film doesn’t linger too long, getting characters introduced and moving the Earps through the events in Tombstone as they set up shop. The film does have a lot of characters, many of whom could have been trimmed (a subplot involving Earp’s common law wife getting hooked on laudanum goes nowhere and it, and her character, could have been excised entirely), but for the most part the early acts of the film work well and get you into the movie.

Of course, the early acts of the film also feature all the best scenes of Doc Holliday. It’s not that. Russell or the rest of the fine actors in the film are bad (and there are so many great actors in this film, from Powers Boothe, to Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Billy Bob Thornton, Thomas Haden Church, Dana Delany, and too many others to list), it’s just the Kilmer was at a whole other, different level from the rest. They’re making a pretty standard Western that would please general audiences, while Kilmer was off reinventing the cowboy dandy and it was fantastic.

Kilmer worked hard for the role, going about as method as he could (which he was known to do, such as when he memorized the entire The Doors back catalog for his performance as Jim Morrison). He practiced quick draw and pistol tricks (which he put to great effect not with a pistol but with a tin cup in one of the movie’s best scenes). He also worked with a dialect coach to learn to speak like an effete Southern gentleman, sounding like no one else in the film at all. But it’s even in the small moments, the way he reacted, the way he said certain lines, that really sold Holliday.

When one character questions why Holliday would ride out with Earp when, clearly, Holliday is dying, Doc comments, “he’s my friend.” Saying that the man has a lot of friends, as if to dismiss that idea, Holliday says, “I don’t.” The way Kilmer says that line, adding in sadness and loss but playing it all in an understated style, you get the sense of just how much it really means. Kilmer stole every scene, and he chewed scenery when it was needed, but he knew exactly how to play this character to make you believe in him. It was amazing.

The film does lose its way somewhat in the last act, when it moves from a propulsive story of friendship and family into blender action and gunfight montages, and this is where most people I know tend to check out. Holliday appears less in these last scenes, although he still steals them when he arrives, and the action itself just doesn’t really work. You need not only Earp but also Holliday in the film, together, to sell the story and keep the audience focused, and the last act just doesn’t have that energy. It’s rushing to an ending instead of caring for the story and the characters still.

But that doesn’t dull the fact that Kilmer was absolutely brilliant in this film. Without him Tombstone would have just been a run-of-the-mill Western action movie, but because of Kilmer it became so much more. It never achieved the level of acclaim I’m sure the cast and crew wanted, and the film only managed to recoup $73.2 Mil against its $25 Mil budget, allowing it to break even but not really making it successful. Still, even in the reviews that hated the movie at the time, people continued to praise Kilmer’s performance. He is the film, turning this bland Western into the “Doc Holliday Show”, and it’s probably one of his finest performances ever.

If you haven’t seen it, you do owe it to yourself to watch Tombstone. You’re there for Kilmer, and he’s worth the price of admission. And once you’ve seen it you’ll know why everyone loves Kilmer’s performance even if they otherwise don’t like the movie. It’s transcendent.