Rust Didn’t Choose to Echo Its Tragedy, But It Courses Through the Film

Alec Baldwin in a still from Rust that’s nowhere to be found in the final cut of the film that premiered in Poland. Photo: Highland Film Group

It was a cold, overcast afternoon in Toruń, Poland, as a packed theater watched Alec Baldwin shoot people. You’ve not seen this film, but you know the story of how we got here. Three years have passed since the cast and crew of Rust were drawn into a whirlpool of tragedy so unthinkable it makes more sense as a plot than a headline, urban legend before matter of immense legal concern — which, in at least two cases, engendered punishment. The moment a real bullet fired from a prop gun to kill cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, the film was transformed into an object of morbid curiosity.

It’s undeniable that a certain percentage of people who attended its Camerimage International Film Festival world premiere today were rubbernecking the tail end of a long, difficult, outright-ignoble yearslong saga — undoubtedly the most attention ever visited upon a low-budget geezer-teaser. In a queue outside the Toruń theater, journalists could be heard asking audience members, some of whom were simply present to watch the American western, for quotes, while others — namely Hutchins’s colleagues and loved ones — were there to pay tribute to her life and work. Together, the crowd represented an uneasy marriage between spectatorship and grieving.

Camerimage has celebrated cinematographers for 30-plus years — among the thousands of times I’ve seen movies in theaters, the only applause for DPs, camera operators, or second-unit members (with crickets for writer, director, stars) occurs here — and constitutes a kind of annual hajj for the world’s greatest technician-artists and newcomers alike. Its loyal community, surprising precisely nobody, have feelings about this premiere: Oscar nominee Rachel Morrison, whose feature-directing debut, The Fire Inside, screened this week, voiced dissent on Camerimage’s Instagram; a private WhatsApp group of regular attendees deemed the programming “distasteful” and “tone deaf”; a fellow journalist referred to it in conversation as “Rust day” in the tone with which one invokes a colonoscopy.

For many, the question of whether screening Rust was even a good idea stands purely rhetorical. But I’ll offer this bit of inside information: On my ride from the Warsaw Chopin Airport, I realized I was traveling among those closely associated with the film; one such passenger told me they considered this trip a key part of processing a friend’s senseless passing. In conversation they relayed further that the cinematographer’s widower and son alike wished for this final work to be seen.

Certain Sturm und Drang surrounding Rust between 2021 and today was echoed inside Toruń’s unvarnished Cinema City. (Should you somehow never find yourself rolling through, picture a small-town American multiplex while replacing the English-language posters with Polish-language facsimiles.) Photographers were capturing us while we entered, as if people in softshells and backpacks carried much visual interest; I entered to find quite a few more photographing Rust director Joel Souza and festival director Marek Żydowicz, the two carrying conversation amid the din and clicks of cameras. I took some time to note Souza’s body language: His posture, slightly hunched with arms crossed, conflicted with a smile tightly held as friends and colleagues greeted him. This was an afternoon to support but also to mourn.

Those in attendance were asked to stand and take a moment of silence for Hutchins. Żydowicz and fellow director Kazimierz Suwała then delivered statements calmly but with a certain polemicism: While “a lot of things have happened” since announcing Rust’s inclusion, they expressed hope we would “see [they] made the right decision,” and further that we watch only as witnesses of a film, not any tragedy or extended legal proceedings — “no other reasons are of importance.”

The centerpiece, though, was Rachel Mason, Hutchins’s friend currently at work on a documentary about the ordeal. Mason took the most stage time to, in emphatic tones, discuss crew members’ devotion to the project on the cinematographer’s behalf; this climaxed with the reading of an email wherein Hutchins’s mother stated hope of seeing the film finished on behalf of herself, her deceased daughter, and her motherless grandson. No mention was made of Baldwin over the course of these 20-or-so minutes; any potential allusion will have to rest in a thanking of “the actors” who helped finish the film.

Rust is indeed what was advertised: an 1880s- and Kansas-set film about a 13-year-old boy who accidentally kills a rancher and flees the law with his grandfather. The first time a trigger is pulled in Rust, it clicks on an empty barrel; the second leads to a character’s accidental death, engendering a full-bore gasp from premiere attendees. While I didn’t take time to poll this at-capacity crowd, that reaction seemed less from deep investment in a just-started plot than some breath of acknowledgment — Rust didn’t choose to echo its own tragedies, but they course through a film that is often compelling and capable, an appropriately unvarnished western tale about guilt, blame, family, law, and devotion. The shock comes after some narrative table-setting, but it’s clear from the first two shots — a match cut between extreme, Leone-esque close-ups of Baldwin and newcomer Patrick Scott McDermott’s eyes — that Rust is, in some qualitative sense, a real film not kin with the Randal Emmett factory giving aging stars a comfy paycheck off the back of horrid material.

What percentage was shot by Hutchins remains unclear; it makes notable that fellow DP Bianca Cline refused to take potential credit for widescreen landscape shots, slow push-ins, deliberate zoom-outs, or lovely uses of silhouette. Rust’s greatest deficiencies are in trying to thread a needle between its three connected plots — an outlaw, a lawman, and a bounty hunter that clearly leans toward The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — and a lead actor visibly shaken by his experiences. Baldwin is often off-balance: His accent and the overall volume of performance wobble from scene to scene; the relationship with McDermott’s Lucas veers between affection and disinterest. Schedules chopped apart by 18 months and one death are a fair guess for accounting. Maybe it’s just uncomfortable watching him deliver numerous kills with a gun not unlike the one in a forever-infamous still from a scene that’s nowhere to be found in this final cut.

An ensuing press conference with Souza and Cline yielded mention after mention of Hutchins; no matter the question or answer, all roads traveled back to a stolen life. The most compelling moment, accordingly, was a flare-up: Camerimage’s more-than-capable moderator inquired as to how much of the surviving film came from each DP. Cline shot back: “I think it’s a terrible question.” This could be chalked up to entirely understandable emotion, and a scramble to recover the (dour) mood — a clarification that some appreciation of Hutchins’s artistry was the question’s stated intent — seemed agreeable to all involved parties. As soon as the event closed, I noticed Cline and said moderator commiserating.

None of this three-hour-plus affair was easy for anybody involved. (I certainly don’t envy Souza and Cline sitting through this film and enduring attendees pulling out their bright phones, an incredible nuisance I’ve encountered at nearly every screening this year.) And where Rust travels henceforth is uncertain. As of this writing there are no further festival engagements announced; distribution outfit The Avenue, which acquired the film for $2 million during pre-production, is not featured in the opening logos or end credits and perhaps absolved of further duties. Whenever it emerges, audiences will find a work of salutary effect and simple pleasure saturated in morbid curiosity — strange monument, ugly footnote.

I have to wonder if anything about today was a surprise; if — no matter it having actually premiered and being, I promise, a real movie with scenes and actors and dialogue — Rust was, still, never really a movie. Its end credits are preempted with a quote from Hutchins that it’s near-impossible not to find devastating: “What can we do to make this better?”