Beyond contemporary newspaper reports and court testimony, there are two primary sources of information about the central moment of the Earp saga, at least as most people find it interesting, the gunfight at the OK Corral. The first book-length memoir of the event was by Deputy County Sheriff Billy Breckinridge, which painted a very bleak portrait of the Earps as thugs and criminals. This was answered by a book by Josie Marcus, Wyatt's common-law wife. Her book is by far the more credible, as she makes no effort to white-wash or hero-ize the Earps - they come across as complicated men with a complicated ethics. The film that came out shortly before this one, "Tombstone," unabashedly adopts the version of the story Josie presented; there are few media presentations of the Breckrinridge version, the most notorious being the poorly received Stacy Keach film of the early '70s "Doc." The interesting thing about "Wyatt Earp" is that it tries to avoid either of these perspectives; that's a mistake, because the middle ground is already held by Josie thanks to her honesty; the legend of Earp-as-hero (e.g., "My Darling Clementine" or the old Wyatt Earp TV show) is actually derived from word-of mouth folk-tales and dime novels, not based on any experience or record, so if you're going to dispel the myth without accepting the Breckinridge propaganda as the basis of your story, you have to resort to Josie's version, and if then you reject that what you need is some theme to define your focus, otherwise you're just going to cram your story with incidental biographical details that never congeal into a dramatic whole - which is precisely what happens here.
This film is a mess - it is literally all over the place. One loses track of all the minor characters we meet in locations all over the West. Incidents are framed as though they portend dramatic implications, which never at last come to light. The dialog also fails to make its impact. Costner's Wyatt certainly comes across as dour and enigmatic, but never as complicated or as ethically complex as he appears to have been in real life.
Put bluntly: Wyatt Earp was a Puritan (i.e., Calvinistic) atheist, a precursor to the 20th Century existentialist, who committed himself to action (sometimes very violent) and adventures, not because he loved excitement or discovery, but because there was really nothing else to do that would make life meaningful. The 19th Century literary equivalent would be some sort of synthesis of the obsessed Ahab and the meandering Ishmael of Melville's "Moby Dick." Now such a personality could give us a helluva story, even if not completely realized - and while "Tombstone" is a fine portrayal of the basic narrative, there's no doubt that it is too 'Hollywood' to capture the real depth of the character in Russell's Performance.
But while Kostner seems to understand how deep Earp's personality runs and in what direction, he seems to keep trying to figure him out, as if he could find the key to this enigma that would open the door to the core of Earp's personality. But Despite the greater superficiality of Russell's performance, Russell is actually closer to that key, which is defined as Earp's apparent determination that any such personality core simply doesn't exist and that the proper response to this discovery is to act rather than question.
So think of the Kostner Wyatt Earp as an Ahab without a white whale to hunt, an Ishmael without a Pequod to sign onto. Thus the film "Wyatt Earp" just wanders around the 'wild West' equivalents of the whaling towns Melville describes in the opening of his novel looking for some thematic purpose to focus on. It never gets there.
This film is a mess - it is literally all over the place. One loses track of all the minor characters we meet in locations all over the West. Incidents are framed as though they portend dramatic implications, which never at last come to light. The dialog also fails to make its impact. Costner's Wyatt certainly comes across as dour and enigmatic, but never as complicated or as ethically complex as he appears to have been in real life.
Put bluntly: Wyatt Earp was a Puritan (i.e., Calvinistic) atheist, a precursor to the 20th Century existentialist, who committed himself to action (sometimes very violent) and adventures, not because he loved excitement or discovery, but because there was really nothing else to do that would make life meaningful. The 19th Century literary equivalent would be some sort of synthesis of the obsessed Ahab and the meandering Ishmael of Melville's "Moby Dick." Now such a personality could give us a helluva story, even if not completely realized - and while "Tombstone" is a fine portrayal of the basic narrative, there's no doubt that it is too 'Hollywood' to capture the real depth of the character in Russell's Performance.
But while Kostner seems to understand how deep Earp's personality runs and in what direction, he seems to keep trying to figure him out, as if he could find the key to this enigma that would open the door to the core of Earp's personality. But Despite the greater superficiality of Russell's performance, Russell is actually closer to that key, which is defined as Earp's apparent determination that any such personality core simply doesn't exist and that the proper response to this discovery is to act rather than question.
So think of the Kostner Wyatt Earp as an Ahab without a white whale to hunt, an Ishmael without a Pequod to sign onto. Thus the film "Wyatt Earp" just wanders around the 'wild West' equivalents of the whaling towns Melville describes in the opening of his novel looking for some thematic purpose to focus on. It never gets there.