---

Walker (1987) starts not at the beginning of its subject’s life but just before he started down the path to his doom. This biopic, written by Rudy Wurlitzer and directed by Alex Cox, is about William Walker, a soldier of fortune probably best known today for successfully — albeit briefly — usurping Nicaragua’s president and lording over the country between 1856-57 with the support of its Democratic Party. (He ultimately was forced out by an alliance of Central American armies who wanted Walker, who was planning to further exercise control by introducing slavery, gone.) 

The minutiae of Walker aren’t accurate. But Cox isn’t looking to make veracious historical fiction or even portraitize his subject. It’s the broader themes inherent to Walker’s story — the ugliness of imperialism and hypocritical invocations of democracy and religion as means to justify it; the corrupting nature of power — that fascinate him. Cox, in turn, makes a thrilling black comedy mocking the foundational inanities of both without dismissing the horrors they wreak, all while drawing parallels to then-modern American interventionism in the region.

Much has been made of Cox’s use of anachronism in Walker. Some scenes are visually interrupted by sights of half-emptied glass Coke bottles and packs of Marlboros. Other intrusions are aural, whether by rock music or saxophone-heavy jazz. Mid-movie, a couple carriage-riding characters read new issues of People and Newsweek as an ‘80s-era sedan races past them. These moments are goofy. But they also work, given how much their presence increases as the movie goes on, as amusing indicators of how much an inescapable presence Walker and the America he represents are starting to take. They don’t make any sense here, but they insist on being around anyway.

Ed Harris plays the title character with a rumbling intensity. You watch him warp slowly, beginning the film a supposedly true believer in democracy and equality only to find those principles mattering less to him with time. Upon arriving in Nicaragua, Walker is adamant that he and his men — hired in the movie by the antic multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle) to sort out an agreement with the country’s government to secure some shipping rights — to respect the locals and give space to their culture rather than stampede it. (Those who do early on are ordered killed by Walker.) 

But such civility only can last so long when the goal foundationally requires a governmental overthrow. The more control and influence Walker accumulates, the less he resembles the person he was at the film’s start. He’s motivated no longer to better the world: enlarging his own dominion takes precedence. (He’s always had delusions of grandeur, though: look at his off-and-on tendency to speak about himself in the third-person, his way of snaking through war scenes as if he were bulletproof.) Harris’ performance isn’t showy; it doesn’t fit our expectation of the power-hungry madman. His sculpted face mostly stays placid while a destructive appetite for more almost casts off his body. The understatedness isn’t underwhelming: it’s quietly frightening.

Walker falls flat in its representation of the Nicaraguan populace. While Cox doesn’t minimize the violence and destruction inflicted on it for the sake of American financial interest and one progressively erratic quest for power, they’re characterized here almost entirely as a helpless, uncultured monolith, with few characters aside from the Nicaraguan mistress Walker eventually takes (Blanca Guerra) given prominent speaking roles or points of view worth sharing. 

Walker is the last movie Cox ever directed in close proximity to the A list — a place for which he was never destined but, with movies like Repo Man (1984) and Sid and Nancy (1986), came awfully close.Walker had support from Universal. But promotion was negligible from a studio that didn’t know how to market it. And most audiences didn’t know what to do with a movie neither a straightforward biopic nor satire. Not helped by his choice to work on a studio project during the Writers Guild of America strike of 1988, Cox’s reputation subsequently soured. He’s never since directed anything as well-regarded or -financed as anything making up his ‘80s oeuvre. But if Walker, an original and daring movie, represents his last chance at mainstream success, it’s a hell of a final word, a headfirst dive into a vat of fire.