“Accidental Texan” opened with 100-percent audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics were around 33 percent. Now, it’s 96 percent to 52. It stars Thomas Haden Church, Carrie-Anne Moss, Bruce Dern, and Rudy Pankow.
As I started watching the film, I agreed with the critics. By the end, I agreed with the audience. Here’s the best way to watch this film—in three installments. It’s a very slow build. Watch for five minutes, then switch to an action movie. Next day, watch 10–15 minutes, and then switch to something faster again. By the third day, you’ll be engrossed enough to watch the rest of the movie without training wheels, and you’ll be happy you finished it.
‘Chocolate Lizards’
Based on Cole Thompson’s novel “Chocolate Lizards” (is that not a great name for oil-drilling roughnecks?), “Accidental Texan” opens with young Erwin Vandeveer (Rudy Pankow), a Harvard-dropout-turned-actor with the requisite big ego and brattiness. Erwin gets fired from his first movie role on a New Orleans-based set, by forgetting to heed an assistant’s warning to silence his cellphone before a big scene. The phone rings at the worst possible moment, inadvertently detonating multiple squibs attached to Erwin’s shirt for purposes of a bloody shootout.In despair, but with a valuable lesson in humility under his belt, he heads back to Los Angeles, all the while avoiding calls from both his agent and his father. (Dad naturally hates his kid’s career choice.)
As fate would have it, Erwin’s car breaks down in the heart of Texas oil country. Abandoning the car in a field, he schleps himself to the sleepy, small town of Buffalo Gap, where, at a breakfast spot, he meets two kindhearted strangers: proprietor and cafe waitress Faye (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Merle Luskey (Thomas Haden Church), a veteran roughneck. “I punch holes in the earth like a badass,” proclaims Merle, explaining the difference between a roughneck and a redneck. Merle owns a small drilling company with one rig.
Erwin’s unable to cough up the $600 needed to repair his Prius, so resourceful Merle offers to help him in return for a small favor. Merle could use some assistance salvaging his oil business before a big oil corporation headed by Max Dugan (Brad Leland from the TV series “Friday Night Lights”) puts him out of business permanently.
Church Charm
The casting is spot-on, in that Mr. Church was raised in the Lone Star State and owns a ranch there now. As always, he delivers a wily, incorrigible, charming rascal of a character—one of those rare, avuncular men who excels at taking lost, searching younger men under his wing and humorously steering them back to the life path they wandered off from—and, in Erwin’s case, literally.
The two develop some fun, comedic teamwork in pulling the wool over the eyes of Merle’s oil adversaries, and are just as engaging as they address the more dramatic elements of their respective pasts: Merle lost his son in a car accident years earlier; Erwin confides and confesses, regarding his archetypal father-son issue, that he disappointed his hidebound dad by giving Harvard the old heave-ho and heading for the Hollywood hills.
Mr. Pankow has a nice coming-of-age character arc—from fish-out-of-water ivory tower denizen to rolling up his sleeves, helping Merle remove chickens from cages they’ve brought along in the back of Merle’s truck, opening up the competition’s cars, holding the chickens over the car seats, and giving the birds a quick but vigorous squeeze.
Veteran actor Mr. Dern plays a cantankerous (what else?) old rancher named Scheermeyer, who dotes on his prized bull and whose land sits on a whole lotta black gold. Scheermeyer will pull a shotgun on anyone sniffing around his property, so it’s a good thing he’s got a soft spot for Faye, who’s able to finesse an introduction between him and Merle.
Erwin puts on a seat-of-his-pants, landsman-impersonating, improv-acting clinic for Merle along with some spy and reconnaissance work, comes to believe in the cause, cheers the whole work crew on, and plays Cupid to the subdued, hesitant affection between Merle and Faye. It’s kind of too bad that Erwin doesn’t have a romantic interest himself of some sort, but it matters little.
Austin filmmaker Mark Bristol, a former storyboard artist, delivers a slow-starting, fun, funny, and warm comedy that, much like the “The Milagro Beanfield War,” may make you feel like revisiting occasionally.
“Accidental Texan,” though filled with an abundance of clichés, will deliver chuckles, a tear or two, and bequeath some hope for humanity, which is in short supply these days.
