I had a hell of a time writing about the passing of Kris Kristofferson, because what I wanted to convey was more feeling than thought. Less an essay about life and more a poem about presence. I gave up trying to get it right, simply wrote a series of impressions and observations about an American Pilgrim, and then reassembled these words in the hopes that it would capture what he meant to me.
Kristofferson looked the part. A wiry presence, he had a lion's mane atop his head and a thick chiseled beard across his face. Both hair and beard looked like they emerged from the womb with him. When he wore that beard as an actor, I always imagined the characters he played had grown it to hide scars. I told myself he earned them by defending someone who couldn't defend themselves. He wasn't covering those scars for vanity, but because he didn't want to make a big deal out of how he got them.
He looked the part. But he never got the part. The Part. The movies loved him, but they didn't know what to do with him. Even when they did, they couldn't quite get it right. He would end up in the service of a bigger box office star or sacrificed on the altar of directorial ego. However, he did assemble a collection of scenes, moments, and images that linger in the mind and capture the essence of what was and could have been on film. More importantly, they capture something essential about the man, and what he meant to so many.
Kristofferson looked the part of a role that was conceived but never finished. I have to believe it was because he treated the movies as a mistress, a wild fling he threw himself into before coming to his senses and returning to his true love of songwriting. Had he walked away from the music and run off to the movies, there might be a different story to be told. But he didn't. Instead, we are left with an indelible but elusive image. I think we are also left with a man who was ultimately free to be his true self.
When pastors speak of the prodigal son, I always picture a younger Kristofferson. His early performances as the notorious outlaw in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the degenerate biker from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and the compromised troubadour of Kid Cisco are effortless projections of men with vast charismatic promise reduced to western wastrels. They live, like the wanton son, in a literal or metaphorical pigsty.
Ultimately, the prodigal son comes home. So it was with Kristofferson. He looked the part. His beard arrived soon after those movies and with it the loving patience of David from 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Director Martin Scorsese captured him as the presence I came to know. In that film, Kristofferson holds himself as a man who has walked through hard country, received its wounds, and emerged from the other end intact. Watch his romantic proposal to Ellen Bustyn's Alice. You'll see him as the sequel to the gospel tale of the wayward son. He's a character gifted with the unexpected grace of forgiveness and determined to impart its perpetual bounty. His tired but hopefully mischievous blue eyes promise to share a redemption he has already earned.
His journey through the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls cinema of the Seventies is a quest to find that character a movie of its own. Not quite the leading man, he is too big to be a sidekick. Playing second fiddle to Burt Reynolds in Semi-Tough and Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born, he comes dangerously close to stealing those films from their ostensible leads. He commands the screen so much that the former film gives over to his charisma by giving him the girl and the latter is fortunate that he, by design, is nowhere to be found in its final moments.
Watch those earliest films, and you'll notice he is developing something remarkable. He is at his best as an actor when observing the world around him. He delights in the hijinks of his friends, softly breaks when he sees them hurt, and projects the moral disgust only a righteous man can in the face of injustice. Each played subtly like a singular held note on an acoustic guitar. Like the ability to pray convincingly on screen, it is a gift few performers have. It places him in the rarefied air inhabited by the likes of Jimmy Stewart.
He looked the part, he commanded the screen, and he possessed that indefinable but obvious-to-sight quality of it. It was all set for him if he wanted it. But just like his military service, his relationship with the industry was uneasy at best. If such a thing is possible, he may have been too authentic. On the screen, he comes across as simply himself with no ambition to become anything else. I've often wondered if that wonderful gift of observational acting was a studied affectation or just Kristofferson himself reveling in the performances around him. Collecting material for songs. After all, his real ambitions were as a songwriter. That's what propelled him to fly a helicopter to convince Johnny Cash to record "Sunday Morning Coming Down". I cannot imagine him doing the same thing to land a part. The scripts came to him, or they didn't. If something caught his interest, he took it, and if a producer took a pass, I'm not sure he really cared.
As the decade came to an end, two directors saw the true myth making possibilities etched into his face. Those men cast him to perfection as a jaded independent over-the-road truck driver and a world weary federal marshall whose idealism has faded. Even if you don't know the films, you can see him in both descriptions. Were you to assemble his best scenes from both movies, you would assume these films made him an audience favorite and a critics' darling.
But perfect casting does not make perfect movies. Sam Peckinpah's 1978 Convoy and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate of 1980 foundered on the rocks of each directors' idiosyncratic excesses. Rather than a breakout hit, the first was only a modest box office success. Convoy's failure to achieve the stratospheric popularity of its inspirational song or Smokey and The Bandit was the result of Peckinpah's inability to figure out the tone of the script. His notorious substance abuse issues certainly didn't help.
Heaven's Gate was a genuine disaster. Hot off the success of The Deer Hunter, Cimino received a blank check, the final cut, and permission to shoot millions of feet of film. The story of how a deeply humanist telling of The Johnson County War spiralled out of control, wrecked a studio, and changed Hollywood has been well documented. However, at no point is Kristofferson the problem. His performance of a man holding onto his ideals in a world of cruel violence is deeply affecting. But it is buried under spectacular tracking shots of Harvard graduation ceremonies, levels of insane detail in the construction of an exact replica of Casper, Wyoming, circa 1890, and a mad penchant for shooting romantic carriage rides only at golden hour. Then there's this amazing shot, which must have taken days, followed by two minutes of intermission music. When the film finally opened a year behind schedule to disastrous reviews, its director's career was essentially over and the fallout from the catastrophe changed the careers of all involved.
History would be kinder to the film's epic vision, but the damage was done.
While neither to blame for the underperformance of the first film nor the failure of the second, Kristofferson's moment as a true leading man had passed even before it started. I often wonder if either of those directors had gone into production with a finalized script and a willingness to collaborate would the tributes emerging this week from Hollywood be of a different nature.
Is there a world where the discussion would be of multiple Academy Awards and a comprehensive body of memorable work? Are acting students watching the scene with him and Ernest Borgine, as Rubber Duck and Sheriff Lyle respectively, in Convoy where they discuss the dying breed of over-the-road drivers? Is that class using it as an example of the importance of listening in performance? Are there film retrospectives of great cinema that show Kristofferson's Marshall James Averill's long walk across the Casper train platform to the elegiac strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? Do film historians point to it when explaining movie myth making in the old west?
I wonder, but I'm not so sure.
Because while Kristofferson looked the part of a leading man, he was not willing to play it. Not willing to lead the way movie stars traditionally do. He was the Ranger Captain who didn't put his foot down when Peckinpah went on cocaine benders at the expense of their production. He was a Rhodes Scholar and West Point professor of English unwilling to argue with Cimino over the clarity of the script as Eastwood and DeNiro had famously done in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter. I suspect that deference came from a respect for the chain of artistic command. He was there to play his role while trusting in the creative process. He always had a deep admiration for maverick artists and was willing to let them do their thing. In the movies, he often seems the most gifted member of a great supporting band for a headliner name. I wish he would have grabbed the mic and taken the stage, but I understand.
He had songs to write, causes to champion, and little people to protect. Most importantly he had a world to observe. My most subversive take is that he took the roles he took to get an up close look at heightened emotions, get the paycheck that would allow him the freedom to do the songwriting he so loved, and ultimately bring his own lyrics to performative life. I particularly hope that last one is true. It is intoxicating to think of an artist using one art form to inspire another. Utilizing a performance to embody a completed song while employing the same process to simultaneously find inspiration for the next.
Watch those movies, his movies, again. More than looking the part, Kristofferson looked like his songs. It's like his songs have walked into those movies. It is easy to picture Martin "Rubber Duck" Penwald busted flat in Baton Rouge, Kid Cisco on a Sunday morning sidewalk wishing he was stoned, or an earlier version of David, before he met Alice, asking a stranger to help him make it through the night.
When I add up all my favorite moments in his movies, I can't help but see a specific version of America emerge. It is a country built by the strong, both physically and morally. Built by the strong but to protect the weak. Never quite getting the job done. It's an America that begins with high ideals, makes terrible mistakes, course corrects, makes new mistakes, and dusts itself off, once again, to search for solutions. Hardened by adversity, hopeful by instinct, longing for something it can't quite remember, and believing what's next somehow, someway, has to be better.
I hope Kris didn't take that with him. I want to believe he left it behind for us in his movies and his records. I think it's there in the chorus of "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33".
He's a poet, he's a picker
He's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
Here's hoping someone's waiting for him when he finds his way there.
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