Sweetwater Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Sweetwater Blu-ray Movie Review

Nothing Sweet About It

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 16, 2013

Sweetwater belongs to a small but select sub-genre of female revenge Westerns, and it's a worthy addition alongside 1971's Hannie Caulder, which starred Raquel Welch in the title role as a woman who engages a bounty hunter to teach her gunfighting so that she can track down the men who raped her and killed her husband. In 1994's Bad Girls, four ex-hookers formed an outlaw gang after one of them shot an abusive customer. And in The Quick and the Dead (1995), Sharon Stone offered a distaff version of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name as "The Lady", who rides into Gene Hackman's town to enter a "quick draw" contest (and for other reasons).

Sweetwater's angel of death is played by Mad Men's January Jones, whose detached stillness proves to be ideal for the part. Imagine if Betty Draper had reacted to her husband's lies and affairs not with a divorce but by pulling out a pistol, shooting him through the heart, then calmly disappearing to start a new life. The show would have ended, but the scene would go down in history. Jones brings the same deferred intensity to the rampage that serves as Sweetwater's grand finale.

The second feature from the creative team of twin brothers Logan and Noah Miller, Sweetwater was nominally directed by Logan but the accompanying documentary strongly suggests that the brothers worked together, as they did on their first feature, Touching Home. That film starred Ed Harris, who co-stars and served as executive producer here. The Millers rewrote an original script by Andrew McKenzie, and it's not hard to spot the influence of Quentin Tarantino's love of genre cinema and lurid stylization in the Millers' work. There may be common influences as well, since Tarantino's own female revenge film, Kill Bill, owes a major debt to Hannie Caulder. But where Tarantino's eccentric characters routinely express themselves through florid passages of dialogue, the Millers' approach is more spare and visual. They keep the speeches simple and let the cast fill in the eccentricities with performance—and also wardrobe. The killers in Sweetwater are easy to spot. They're the ones whose clothing makes them stand out from the landscape.

Sweetwater is presumably the name of the town near which the paths of three main characters collide. (I say "presumably", because the town is never identified; the film's original title was "Sweet Vengeance".) The film opens with Ed Harris' Jackson, a lone rider against the gorgeous but desolate New Mexico landscape, with long white hair, outlandish attire and eccentric behavior. We will later learn that he has been sent on an important errand by powerful interests. The errand involves relieving the current sheriff of Sweetwater, Kingfisher (Luce Rains), of his duties, which Jackson does in a typically colorful manner. Then he sets about his task, which involves locating two missing brothers, Levi and Jacob (Noah and Logan Miller, in director cameos).

The viewer already knows the fate of the brothers, who met up with the Prophet Josiah (Jason Isaacs, best known as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films). Some might describe Josiah as a religious zealot, but he isn't that at all. Josiah is a mad cult leader who uses religion as a scam, and he has assembled a small team of followers who do his bidding, including a killer named Daniel (country singer Jason Aldean). Always dressed in black, Josiah is living proof that the devil can quote scripture for his own purposes. He keeps the men in his charge busy building white crosses that lead to his compound like the good intentions paving the road to hell. His own interests seem to be murder, land acquisition and servicing all the female members of his flock.

Josiah's interests unite in the person of January Jones' Sarah, wife of Miguel Ramirez (Eduardo Noriega). The couple has bought a plot of land next to Josiah's sheep ranch and is trying to start a farm, and Josiah has eyes equally for the lovely Sarah and the additional acreage. He despises Miguel for being Mexican, racism being just another of the Prophet's many un-Christian characteristics. His attitude is mirrored by the inhabitants of Sweetwater, where the local banker, Hugh (Stephen Root), takes half the couple's savings in "fees", and the general store owner, Martin (Vic Browder), offers Sarah dresses to try on so that he can peep through a hole in the dressing room wall.

Sarah was once a town prostitute, and no one wants to let her start over, least of all the mother who turned her out and continues to operate the local whorehouse (Amy Madigan, in a brief but memorable appearance). Because of Sarah's former status, all the men think that everything is allowed, but they discover differently. When the Prophet Josiah goes too far (way too far), he awakens a different side of Sarah, as she dons a vivid purple dress that becomes her gunslinger's habit, as distinctive as the Man with No Name's faded serape. As bodies pile up all over Sweetwater, Jackson picks up Sarah's trail, which leads directly to Josiah's compound, where the final reckoning occurs.

Sweetwater Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sweetwater was shot on film by Brad Shield (The Square), a much-in-demand second unit DP on major Hollywood productions (e.g., The Avengers and The Wolverine). Final color timing was completed on a digital intermediate, from which ARC's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has presumably been sourced. The Blu-ray image is generally impressive, with excellent sharpness and detail, a delicately differentiated palette that effectively represents the New Mexico land and sky against which Sarah, Jackson and the Prophet Josiah stand out as misfits, and an appropriate balance of dark and contrast to capture the peculiar quality of the New Mexico light. The transfer's only significant flaw is recurrent video noise that ripples across the long shots, usually in the more complex imagery on the ground. This is not film grain, because it isn't evenly distributed around the frame; it's transfer-induced noise and, to the extent that de-noising software wasn't randomly applied, we can only be grateful. However, at this stage of Blu-ray's evolution, and especially with the software now available in the latest DI suites, it's unusual to encounter such noise, and one must assume that it's an unavoidable side effect of "pushing" the contrast (or perhaps specific colors) to achieve other effects considered desirable.

The average bitrate of 24 Mbps is adequate to avoid any compression errors, especially given the black letterbox bars. While the film has a few major action scenes, it also contains numerous scenes of stillness and dialogue, allowing the compressionist room to maneuver.

Sweetwater Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original 5.1 soundtrack is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA, and it sounds excellent. The surrounds provide some expressively suggestive sound effects for key moments, like the introduction of the Prophet Josiah and his "visionary" moments, when an invisible choir sings around him. The sounds of animals and desert winds also move into the surrounds, where appropriate. The track provides punch and, depending on the weapon, deep bass extension for many of the gunshots. Voices are generally clear, even with Ed Harris' deliberately skewed delivery. The score by Martin Davich, who did Touching Home for the Millers and was the regular composer for ER, runs the gamut from traditional Western to religious themes to action film.

Sweetwater Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Sweetwater (1080p; 1.78:1; 10:32): This is an informative behind-the-scenes featurette that includes interviews with Jones, Harris, Isaacs, Noriega and Ramirez, as well as the Millers. The participants discuss the history of the project, their characters and the experience of making the film, including what it's like to work with sheep as co-stars.



• "Cold Grey Light of Dawn" by Hudson Moore (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:19): This song plays over the closing credits. The visual is a still image, and the audio is DD 2.0 at 192kbps.



• Trailer (1080p; 2.35:1; 1:37).



• Additonal Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Bounty Killer, The Starving Games and Vehicle 19. These can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Sweetwater Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Westerns are an endangered species in American filmmaking. While Sweetwater lacks the studio budget for a full-scale production to rival Ed Harris' own venture into the genre with Appaloosa (2008) or James Mangold's remake of 3:10 to Yuma (2007), the Millers squeeze major production value out of their locations, get the most out of their talented cast and bend the genre cliches with enough originality to keep the story intriguing. And they know not to overstay their welcome. When vengeance is done, the credits roll. Recommended.