The opening half-hour of Charley Varrick is a distillation of American ennui, a portrait of domestic pacification as percolating explosion. The first minute essays a romantic pastoralism, a post-Great Society Americana that could be the fruit of FDR’s Four Freedoms, a Norman Rockwell painting given motion and flesh. This is a Southwestern town that has adapted happily to mid-century modernity’s housekeeping. When a couple on the wrong side of middle age drive up to a bank, discussing an impending deposit, the West has been thoroughly commodified and expectedly tamed.

Until, that is, suddenly, within a swivel, two phantasms etherealize out of nowhere, joining the middle-aged man in a vitriolic bank robbery. The bucolic vision of America has been punctured, and we’ve been moved into an entirely different film, an imminently thunderous eruption of savage brutality that also reveals a brittle, banged-up America in search of an exit from itself.

A different film, I wrote, but Charley Varrick is also uniquely attentive to the continuum of the two worlds. The incendiary eruption will soon frost over into a slow, laconic crawl of an escape that raises the stakes by playing it cool. Varrick is a film about men whose capacity for violence has been formalized into the structure of a quotidian society, a remarkable film about the unremarkable. In three separate, interlocking stories that meticulously and suggestively interweave, director Don Siegel and co-writers Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman (adapting John H. Reese’s The Looters) craft three versions of post-‘60s masculinity that are circumstantially at odds with one another, but essentially overlapping in their mutual adriftness.

Walter Matthau’s titular Charley Varrick, ostensibly the subject of the film, is a casual criminal, a seemingly milquetoast crop-duster turned former stuntman turned criminal. In the passage from mid-century agrarian authenticity and sincerity  to curious risk-taker in a world governed by confusion and subterfuge to outsider criminality weaponizing that chance-y chicanery, the film marks Varrick as a casualty of deindustrialization who is also a prophet of reinvention, able to mobilize his skills for illicit purposes to inhabit the cracks of a failing modernity. In a fallen world, he is a profane survivor.

Joe Don Baker’s Molly is a modern-day cowboy turned hitman, a laconic and self-amused individualist who wields the surface-features of Wild West authenticity like a corrupt and opaque moral code. He’s an old-school mercenary who fancies himself a mercenary whose only recourse to maintaining that vision of self is as an parasitic underling for the underbelly of legitimate business.

Most interesting of all, though, is John Vernon’s Maynard Boyle, a bank higher-up  who uses his position to launder money for the mob, and who sicks Molly on Varrick when the bank they rob turns out to have an excess of mafia money lying in wait, undocumented, within it. In the film’s most inspired scene, a wonderful conversation near a cow field radiating with post-‘60s anxiety, both men doing the talking are speaking genuinely not about the waywardness of their souls but about the forces they find themselves prey to and their surprising comfort with their predators. Each man, in their way, seems essentially content with their place in the world, but they also recognize that this acceptance requires a myopia they have made peace with.

The inner-workings of these men, their capacity for violence and care, is genuine, and it only coexists in America with the placid doldrums of an only apparently comfortable existence because we’ve learned to accept this comfort in ours. Or to expect only the wrong kind of volcanic interruption. In an earlier moment, Vernon is making an inquiry with potentially deadly consequences while conversing with a young girl about her cat’s name. In another film, the girl’s presence would infuse the film with a superficial aura of suspense and dissonance. But there’s no guile here. It would be reducing the film to worry about this girl’s fate. Vernon’s managerial passivity has no interest in harming her. That’s not his style.

Nor is it late capitalism’s. While the frame seemingly binarizes the tranquil foreground with the girl and the dormant violence of the parents who know more of the man’s intentions in the background, the shot ultimately suggests a horrifying harmony. She will be fine,  because the force of violence doesn’t suddenly interrupt anymore, but none of them will, because modernity’s bargain that allows her to be fine is an amicable agreement between domesticity and cruelty to suffuse the violence around them, at a much lower temperature, in the bones of the film itself. When startling violence does erupt, it is simply part of the tapestry of a world that relegates it to the margins, something the film evokes in one shot that depicts a suicide in a frame within a frame. A door closes on one man in a story that has moved beyond him, and which he doesn’t feel like continuing on in.

A not-so-different modernity, then, but it is, perhaps, a different Don Siegel. Most famous for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, apolitically political in a way that arguably evaporates its critique of conformity into a display of it, and, Dirty Harry, his quasi-fascist celebration of insular American individualism threatened by the forces of modernity, Charley Varrick is a vision of a different caliber. Rather than embattled, complacent suburbia pitifully susceptible to (potentially its own) insurgent bodies, or a modern-day resurgence of Wild West raggedness as a battleground for the fate of the American soul against nihilistic forces of social disintegration, Varrick exists in a post-apocalyptic West, an irradiated fallout zone of the late ‘60s in which the New Mexico landscape is a bleak backdrop for a narrative of social ennui. Like Dirty Harry, this film suggests a critique of progress’s potential arrogance, but unlike Harry, it doesn’t lionize untempered individualism as the privileged arbiter to put it back in its place.

If, like Dirty Harry, this is essentially a modern-day Western, it’s also a kind of film noir in that it depicts people getting involved in more than they wanted to bite off, entangling themselves and burrowing deeper and deeper into systems that extend beyond their mental horizons, and hoping that the most negligible of objects doesn’t act as a front for a more threatening one. Guns hide in purses, seemingly peering through objects, revealing a hidden world of pragmatic malevolence beneath the veneer of Americana. What interests Siegel is the minutiae of how this apparent subterfuge interacts with the everyday world, how the two are often one in the same. When Molly accepts his contract in the backrooms of a Chinese restaurant, Siegel takes note of the cans of food lined up like either day players in a more generous story of human survival or the bars of a prison, markers of the restaurant’s usual functioning not ready to be forgotten in the conflict that centers this film’s “narrative.” When Varrick has to evacuate  his trailer-house suddenly, the tell-tale sign of his absconding is his dairy products laid out on his landlords doorstep in a similar array, not wanting it to go to waste because his act of sheer survival has gotten in the way of them being eaten, which is to say, of him surviving.

A simple, seemingly meaningless reference, unlocks so much about the fifteen year gulf between Varrick and the cool-cucumber ‘50s films it calls back to. When Varrick’s lover, apparently trying to have sex facing in every direction,  says “you still owe me south by southwest,” Siegel’s film registers the amused itch of Hitch’s North by Northwest, a joke corroborated  given Varrick’s previous life as a stunt pilot in a crop-dusting plane. This previous job of course nods to one of the classic cinematic suspense sequences in Hitch’s wry, deflationary study of mid-century masculinity and American cynicism. In that film, the advertising man is exposed as little more than a legitimized spy, a modern-day magician of shifting identity navigating tenuous surfaces above an empty center. The crop duster scene is magnificent, but the sequence’s sharpest moment involves the joke that a random person one meets in the middle of nowhere, on the side of the road, in the essentialized heartland of Americana, really could be a threatening revelation or a lackey of a secret conspiracy, that a stranger with no interest in you could be a missed connection to a more beautiful life or a vulture zeroing in on your throat. That film suggests that the only appropriate response to this quintessentially modernist situation is a kind of amoral ironism, a necessary distance held from the world that allows you to wear it lightly, and laugh it with gusto. Fifteen years later, in this more cynical film, one that wears the demise of “the American Century” on its sleeves, Varrick is the pilot, or rather, the ex-pilot, having gone straight by, paradoxically, turning to crime, by bending himself to the world of jagged edges and twisted irons to the point where the only way to maintain a space apart, a realm of private authenticity amidst fluctuating and devious surfaces, is not to glide with it but to sever oneself from it completely. This is a fallen world, and the only way to survive in this America is to seek transcendence through complete refutation of the social, to wander the drifter’s path of Emersonian self-exploration. This is an America in which a collective redemption has been deemed impossible.

This is, then, a work in which becoming something new is both as simple, and as impossible, as just getting by. The film’s finale affirms the American West’s historical promise of self-reinvention, as others have commented, but it is a decidedly melancholic reconsideration of selfhood, a deeply thin version of liberation. As Varrick leaves his old persona behind, his vehicle burns with a pathos as evocative as the lost childhood sled of Charles Foster Kane. Unlike Kane, though, Varrick is not deluding himself. He’s a post-modern ironist who knows that his survival is predicated on little more than recognizing how insignificant he is, or how insignificant he can appear. His final plan involves one last act of deceit that returns him to his stunt pilot days. He wins not by succeeding as a lone wolf but by pretending to be a failure, and pretending to be a friend, all from a distance.

The point is that he really is both of these things, a friend to capitalism because he is a failure at overcoming it, but he knows how to manipulate this status to his own gain. While Molly acts the part of an acolyte of old-school Hollywood renegades bucking the system and playing by their own rules, Varrick intuits that he is really in cahoots with the men who oppose him, that the only thing he can do is manipulate their rules, their perception, to his momentary benefit. He understands that they’re all basically fronts in the death drive of American capitalism. Tellingly, the film’s conclusion stages his resurgence by cashing in on his apparent nothingness, adding several more wrecks carted out from his past to a junkyard of American detritus. His cunning is appreciated, but it does not signal a moral victory. Rather, it unsettles the archetypes Siegel is more typically thought to celebrate. What sort of heroism is Varrick’s, and why does it both demand the resurrection of his former self and necessitate its immolation? Could heroism survive in a world where the difference between a fast and slow demise is knowing when to turn being upside down in a crashed plane into a means of self-effacement rather than self-delusion? In Varrick’s phenomenal, scorched-earth finale, the myth of the American bootstrapper-reinventor is turned, literally, upside down and saved, temporarily and tenuously, only because it recognizes how much figurative, and literal, weight is pressing down upon it.

Score: 9/10