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"Off the Map' and in the saddle

 
Published Jan. 23, 2004|Updated Aug. 27, 2005

Want to raise a cowboy? Mamas, let your babies grow up to be like Sam Elliott.

What a terrific model for the role. No actor since John Wayne has ridden as tall in the saddle as often as Elliott. Frederic Remington couldn't have sculpted a more suitable face to peer from under a Stetson hat: chiseled cheekbones and poker-bluff eyes over a thick, drooping mustache.

If Remington's artwork could speak, it would likely sound like Sam Elliott, a soothing growl clogged by trail dust rather than wasted words, a drawling, taciturn sincerity speaking volumes. Everything is shot from the hip, not the lip.

And just like Old West cowboys, Elliott's profession keeps him focused on the next horizon, doggedly going after whatever is out there.

These days, Elliott's frontier is the film festival circuit. Next stop is the Sarasota Film Festival this weekend when the actor presents his new film, Off the Map. This is new dramatic territory for the 59-year-old actor, an independently produced movie that, although filmed in New Mexico, has nothing to do with horses or gunfights.

Elliott plays Charley Groden, a man suffering from chronic depression that drastically affects his rural family in the 1960s. Elliott's voice is still for much of the film, and uncharacteristically strangled by sobs in several scenes. Off the Map, directed by Campbell Scott (Big Night), will be shown at 8 p.m. Saturday at Regal Hollywood 20 in Sarasota, with Elliott and co-star Valentina de Angelis scheduled to attend. Tickets are $7. For a complete schedule, visit www.sarasotafilmfest.com or call (941) 364-9514.

Elliott has never appeared this vulnerable on-screen, and never had to sell a movie like this, bit by bit to festival audiences savoring art more than commercial appeal. Off the Map is under the radar compared with such movies as Hulk, We Were Soldiers and The Contender, in which Elliott was bolstered by stars, sex appeal and studio clout. The Westerns, many made for cable television, took care of themselves simply by adding Elliott to the cast.

This one is different, and Elliott likes it that way.

"It's definitely a departure for me, but a good one," he said by telephone from home, naturally a ranch. "It's always great to have an opportunity to show your wares in an area that, you know, people don't normally think of you in."

Elliott had few doubts that he could handle the role when Scott offered it, and none when he saw the results, first at last year's Sundance Film Festival, then Cannes, then at another half-dozen or so festivals.

"This thing was so well-conceived and well-written and so sensitively directed, for lack of a better word at the moment," he said. "It's absolutely as easy as it could've been. There's plenty of depressing stuff out there in the world today. It's easy enough to draw on."

But with one crucial reversal: Silence is a sign of strength in Elliott's usual roles. Here, it is a sign of emotional weakness.

"In the first quarter of this movie my character doesn't say a word," Elliott said. "He's sitting around with a half-dozen people and there's a lot of conversation, kind of going on around him. He infects the air a little bit with his depression but he's not actively involved in the conversation. At the same time, it's not like I was sitting there like a _ well, hopefully, anyway _ like a bump on a log. I still have to respond to what's going on.

"I found that a little bit tough initially. It's easy to act when you've got words, you know? If you've got no words it becomes a little more of a challenge."

Even more challenging is trying to get a low-key movie like Off the Map noticed.

"I've done a couple of independent movies before but most of them never saw the light of day other than some cable television," Elliott said. "This is the first one for me in which I've gone out, as you call it, on the festival circuit. I'd been to one film festival in Palm Springs about 10 years ago. Now I haven't stopped going to them.

"When you do these independent films you do them for different motives. A major studio's not going to set up a movie if they don't feel very strongly about its commercial opportunities at the end of the road. I don't think people make independent films for that reason. They've got a story they want to tell and they love the filmmaking game. That's certainly the case with this one."

Elliott's cowboy persona began with a brief role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 and was cemented by several cable TV productions over the next three decades: Buffalo Girls, The Sacketts, Conagher and Wild Times among them. The image carried over to the big screen in Tombstone and The Hi-Lo Country, becoming so iconic that filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen chose Elliott to represent Old West morality in the otherwise contemporary comedy The Big Lebowski.

Making small films such as Off the Map, or comic strip adventures like Hulk, or cowboy-as-soldier turns like We Were Soldiers, isn't a sign that Elliott is hanging up his spurs.

"It's a box, a category, a place where I've enjoyed a certain amount of success during my career," Elliott said of his cowboy image. "It's serviced me well. I'm not making some conscious decision to break away from it. I just feel like I've been lucky in the last few years to have opportunities to do things in other areas."

While roving professionally, Elliott stays on a true course at home. He's approaching his 20th anniversary of marriage to actor Katharine Ross (The Graduate, The Stepford Wives), whom he met on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That's remarkable durability for any show business union. Asking Elliott how they do it brings a typically succinct reply ("Work hard at it") then a glimpse of the cowboy in his soul:

"The easy way to deal with married life when it gets tough and it's not going the way you want it is to say the hell with it and throw in the towel," he said. "I think that's one of the things that's wrong with this country. Everybody's kind of throwing in the towel on marriage. It all starts there as far as I'm concerned, the family.

"I'm not going to preach but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out (that if) the American family suffers the whole country will suffer as a result of it. I think the American family has gone a long way down the pipe.

"I got married at age 40. It was my first time. We're blessed with a beautiful, healthy kid. I have no intentions of going anywhere else."