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One might think that — as one of the only American industries still producing a universally-marketable good — Hollywood would have gleaned a thing or two about economics by now. But that’s getting a touch ahead of ourselves: Rango is a great film, named after a nameless lead character with whom every one of us can instantly identify. He’s skinny and fat at the same time. He desperately needs a chiropractor. He screws up everything. And, in the end, we’re all better for having known him.

Having quite literally emerged from under a rock (accidentally dropped, along with the rest of his habitat, from the back of a speeding car), a pet chameleon, delusional with solitude, finds his way to an animal town named Dirt. The lesser beasts aren’t faring that much better than we evolved ones: credit is tight, banks aren’t lending, shops are closing, jobs are nonexistent, and the townspeople are packing their things and headed off in search of the sub-American dream. The only real difference, besides scale (money shot: one building is a converted mailbox), is currency. The animals of Dirt trade in water, not greenbacks.

And it is here that the chameleon takes the name Rango, short for Durango, or “beyond the waters.” Interesting.

By all means this is a film with intellectual bona fides: we learn in time that the mayor (a turtle, curiously enough) is keeping water artificially scarce to cause a credit freeze. Properties are sold for pennies on the dollar, deeds are collected like playing cards, a new, shining city on a hill is built: crimes in the name of development. The filmgoer hardly needs the visual cues of boots, spurs, and horses (roadrunners, actually) to see through this indictment of cowboy capitalism. Apocalyptic language is frequent, deals are struck with devils, and the good people of Dirt find themselves praying to, essentially, Clint Eastwood.

It’s all in good fun, of course, and the mere act of mentioning the film’s politics comes off as a critique, which this is not. Most of us are all savvy enough to remember that the the credit freeze was actually the direct result of a credit glut; that the beneficiaries of the construction recession were schools and hospitals, not hotels, resorts and golf courses; and that the last two years of economic meltdown were not an orchestrated affair by a tiny class of kleptocratic speculators. By the film’s end it almost seems as if the scriptwriters have put down their sword as well. The showdown at noon is resolved with minimal bloodshed (turtle bisque may be on the menu, but it’s prepared off-camera). Almost all is forgiven as soon as the currency comes flooding in again.

Sounds sort of like life, actually.

The music, we should add, is fantastic. Hans Zimmer (responsible for scoring the Batman Begins series, the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and pretty much everything else) adheres to the musician, do no harm school of thought. His bayou hillbilly makeover of Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is both funny and exhilarating:

Los Lobos contributed some of the less orchestral material, including another thematic update of “Misirlou.” Stream the Rango theme right here:

Artist links: