#530: Silent Tongue
A low budget prairie nightmare about grief and revenge
Initial release: February 1, 1994
Director: Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is something of a household name among playwrights. Known for his alienated characters and doomed families, he was preoccupied with the the inherent intangibility of the American Dream. In between producing and directing a prolific back catalog of plays he also wrote and acted in movies, most notably playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff; and on rare occasion, he moved his director’s chair from the theater to the movie set.
Silent Tongue is pure Sam Shepard. Its characters are broken, eccentric people, two families weighed down by tragedy and dysfunction; its setting is a bleak, unforgiving heath. There are almost no buildings the entire movie; other than a small town seen at the beginning and end, the most permanent structure we see for much of the film is a small stage erected for a traveling medicine show. It’s 1873 and Talbot Roe is out of his mind with grief. His half-Native wife Awbonnie has passed away in childbirth, and he lurks near the body like a spectral guardian, refusing to eat or sleep. Desperate for a solution, his father Prescott tracks down the medicine show, the charlatan ringmaster of which sold Awbonnie to Prescott for a few horses the previous year. Prescott wants to buy Awbonnie’s sister, Velada, in the hopes that giving Talbot a replacement will shake him out of his funk. Of course, there’s an added wrinkle in that the sisters are actually daughters of charlatan, Eamon McCree; he’s ambivalent about selling his biggest act (for Velada is quite the entertainer on horseback) but his son Reeves is adamant about not giving away his other half-sister on purely moral grounds. And all the while, Talbot is haunted by the ghost of Awbonnie, and while it’s initially unclear if it’s all in his head or not, she eventually menaces Prescott and Velada as well. Awbonnie has only one goal: to be released from Talbot’s hold on her, by burning her body.
This is a story about broken families, about grief and revenge. It’s clear from what Prescott says that Talbot (played by River Phoenix in what was for 20 years his last, posthumous film until the release of Dark Blood in 2012) was already a mess to begin with, only improving in the presence of Awbonnie, purchased from her white father for some horses, a father who married her mute mother to legitimize the rape he committed — in front of a young Reeves at that. Prescott is a desperate father looking for any solution to save his son, even if it means kidnapping Velada (though she eventually agrees to help on her own… if only because Awbonnie threatened to cut her tongue like their mother if she doesn’t help free Awbonnie’s spirit. Awbonnie and Velada are both described as their mother’s weapons to get revenge against Eamon for his crimes; only Reeves and Velada seem to have any integrity, Reeves dragging his father across the plains in search of Velada, much to Eamon’s protests out of concern for his medicine show, not wanting to leave it unattended.
Despite the broad expanses of the prairie, Silent Tongue is a claustrophobic, disorienting film, with a deranged carnival atmosphere in the vicinity of the medicine show. Much of the film is spent in close-up, and some shots are just oddly framed. I can’t tell if this is a fault of the director or not; the version of the film I saw on Amazon was in 4:3 and had that telltale videotape look, but a little research suggests it was shot in 1:33 and on film. Which it actually is, I don’t know. They were quite obviously working on a shoestring budget as well; Shepard shot the film in the empty expanses of Roswell, New Mexico, turning the scrubby terrain into a canvas for his moody, surreal film.
While Silent Tongue is a curiosity for the presence of River Phoenix, practically a ghost himself for being in a film released less than a year after his death, he’s by far the least interesting of the cast; Richard Harris plays a soft-spoken Prescott, a weather-worn and beaten-down man who feels like a character from another western, aged 20 years and beaten down by life. Alan Bates, one-time British TV icon, is by far the most colorful player here, his Eamon as talkative as he is contemptible (and high on his own supply at that.) Sheila Tousey isn’t a name that will ring many bells unless you’re deep into the Native American acting scene, but her Awbonnie is menacing and tragic, and without her the film would lack a lot of what makes it work.
Silent Tongue is not a perfect movie. It’s an uneven, weird, oppressive mess that upends the usual ideas of what westerns should be like and about; it explores some fascinating themes, but the low budget and amateurish cinematography mar what could have been a grim cult classic.
