Wild, vile West

There’s a void at the center of A Million Ways to Die in the West and its name, apparently, is Seth MacFarlane. The film is a doggedly comical western, and MacFarlane is its star, director, chief writer, co-producer and the author of the companion novelization that preceded it.

That he is, in a sense, both everything and nothing to his movie is perhaps the biggest, most elaborate and most extended of the film’s idiosyncratic jokes and mock-premises. If that sounds a little too much like an art-school exercise in conceptual (and performance) art, there is perhaps some consolation to be found in MacFarlane’s having surrounded himself with a lively group of co-stars and production talents.

Charlize Theron may be the one real saving grace here, in character as well as performance, and even there MacFarlane’s silly, slapdash paradoxes are in play. But this movie also has the benefit of a piquant supporting cast—Neil Patrick Harris, Amanda Seyfried, Giovanni Ribisi, Sarah Silverman, Liam Neeson and Wes Studi—plus brash cameos from Gilbert Gottfried, Christopher Lloyd and Jamie Foxx.

The script (co-written by MacFarlane with Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild) is ostensibly a satire aimed at western movies and fantasies of the Old West. And “satire” in some ways is simply a pretext for a string of fart jokes (and worse). All told, however, the film is a blandly conventional western, albeit one wrapped around a crudely rambunctious comic fantasy decorously splattered with sophomoric scatology.

The story, such as it is, has a somewhat mopey sheepherder named Albert Stark (MacFarlane) incurring the wrath of a murderous cattle rustler named Clinch Leatherwood (Neeson). Plus, Albert’s wispy girlfriend (Seyfried) dumps him and turns her attentions to a mustachioed merchant and fop named Foy (Harris).

Albert’s ferociously stolid parents communicate exclusively through foul language and explosive farts. The poor guy’s only friends in town are nerdy Edward (Ribisi) and his rowdy fiancée (Silverman), a very energetic prostitute named Ruth who won’t sleep with him until after they are married. The difference-makers for Albert’s dilemmas are found elsewhere—Leatherwood’s cheerfully disillusioned wife (Theron) and an amiable and slightly stoned Native American (Studi)—and his key weapons in two high-noon showdowns will be rattlesnake venom and some laxatives.

Harris’ farcical ballet of intestinal distress in one of those showdowns is a rare instance here of performance transcending crude premises. Indeed, Harris’ archly stylized performance in the film as a whole crackles with the kind of comic energy that’s conspicuously absent in most of MacFarlane’s own performance.

MacFarlane gives himself some speeches that yammer trivially in the direction of historical realism, but the drift toward giddy, lightweight fantasy is unmistakable. Production designer Stephen J. Lineweaver and composer Joel McNeely have given the whole enterprise the look and the sound of a blockbuster western from the late 1950s.

But it’s Theron who really stands out. She’s playing a fantasy character who knows she’s obliged to live up (or at least play up) to the fantasies of characters around her—and MacFarlane also gives her room to play the amiable movie star wryly indulging what Albert, Seth, and the rest of us think we see in her.