LOW PLAINS DRIFTER

REVIEWED - DOWN IN THE VALLEYANOTHER modern western arrives here, just four weeks after the briefly released Wim Wenders picture Don't Come Knocking, and writer-director David Jacobson's treatment of western myths in a present-day context feels just as self-conscious and misguided. It helps that Down in the Valley has Edward Norton in the leading role, and Norton, who doubles as the movie's co-producer, burns with screen presence, as ever, writes Michael Dwyer

He plays Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, a supposedly enigmatic drifter first seen working at a gas station in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. Looking as if he had borrowed one of James Dean's most familiar screen costumes, Harlan seems out of place with his Stetson and faded jeans in this sprawling urban environment. Then he opens his mouth and drawls anachronisms such as "Aw, shucks!" One of his customers, a bored valley girl named Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) takes a fancy to him, but her father, a prison officer (David Morse) is wary of Harlan and takes his claims to be a rancher from South Dakota with a very large pinch of salt.

Just as Harlan is fixated on the trappings of the old west, Jacobson pays his own homage to the great westerns of John Ford and George Stevens, but, despite Jacobson's evident visual flair, his work does not withstand comparison. And a sequence where Harlan practises his gunplay before a mirror inevitably echoes the classic "You looking at me?" scene in the far superior Taxi Driver.

When Jacobson's dramatis personae stumble upon the cast of a western shooting in the locality, one can only cringe, although his meandering movie eventually recovers for an imaginative, protracted climax. The cast go a long way towards sustaining interest in such an uneven film, and there is a credible chemistry between Norton and Wood, who showed such promise in Thirteen and here even gets away with Tobe's line that her name is short for October.