John C. Reilly in Heads or Tails?

Italian cinema has a long love affair with the American west, most notably producing the mid-20^th century genre of “Spaghetti western”, Italian-made tales of the American west dominated by Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, which imagine the American west as a place of violence, revenge, possibility, and manifest destiny.

In the twenty-first century, however, not only are we reckoning with the true cost of manifest destiny (genocide, ecological devastation, white supremacy), but Italy is also reckoning with their interest in the American mythos and all its failings. Enter Heads or Tails?, an Italian neo-western that uses Spaghetti western stylings to deconstruct the relationship between Italy and America, a relationship based in fantasy and promise but little truth.

It’s the early 1900s and Buffalo Bill Cody is touring his Wild West Show through Europe. Played with sly savoir faire by John C. Reilly, Cody knows his show is bullsh-t, trumping up Custer’s last stand even as he curses Custer as “stupid” under his breath (an apt historical read on Custer’s military abilities, see also: Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell). He hails his subdued Native American “family” even as he exploits them—it would always be welcome to see Native characters given more of a presence in revisionist westerns, but there is something funny about how bored and disinterested the Natives touring with Cody are with everything Cody and his European counterparts are up to—and he is openly shilling America as a land of endless possibility to an audience of potential immigrants who will not be welcomed with open arms.

While performing for Ercole Rupè (Mirko Artuso), a local landowner in the Italian countryside, Cody is challenged to pit his cowboys against Italian butteri, the accomplished horsemen of Italy. Rupè’s rider is Santino (Alessandro Borghi, who has a kind of Shea Whigham coolness that makes him imminently watchable), and Rupè wants Santino to throw the competition so that Rupè can win a large bet. Santino does not do this, and then is caught by Rupè with Rupè’s downtrodden, abused wife, Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who chooses her moment to kill her oppressive husband. Santino and Rosa go on the run, and Cody is hired to track and retrieve them.

Directed by the duo of Alessio de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, who also co-wrote the script with Carlo Salsa, Heads or Tails? fuses a lot of ideas into a revisionist western. Santino, accredited with killing Rupè, becomes a folk hero and symbol of an anarchist workers’ movement; Rosa struggles with liberation in a time and place in which women are still deeply oppressed; Cody is trying to turn the whole thing into an adventure for a dime novel; and cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo makes the most of the natural beauty of Italy, allowing Italy to play itself in a Spaghetti western. There is also a deeply macabre surrealist bent in the back half of the film that doesn’t really mesh with anything that comes before but is a fun and strange twist on the “madwoman” trope that Rosa skirts throughout the film.

As a whole Heads or Tails? doesn’t quite gel, it’s so full of ideas and big swings, but it is interesting and Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s performance is worth the price of entry alone (it’s no wonder she’s been cast in the next season of The White Lotus). The internecine cinematic relationship between American and Italian westerns is not going to be unpicked by one film, but Heads or Tails? sure tries. And there are a lot of neat ideas, from the relationship between the lie of America Cody is selling to the populism rising in a recently unified Italy—which inevitably turns to fascism a generation later—and how Big Railroad and its attendant corruption shapes so much of the crushing economic forces that disenfranchise the very people who laid the tracks. De Righi and Zoppis find a lot of commonalities between the American old west and early 20^th century Italy, but there is simply too much going on for any of it to form a cohesive narrative.

But as with The Drama, sometimes failure is more interesting than success, and Heads or Tails? is a beautiful, beautifully acted, weird, sharply funny revisionist western taking on two cinematic traditions with the kind of knives-out bravura that contemporary cinema needs more of. It soars on the back of great performances and breathless execution, and sometimes stumbles on a half-baked idea, but it is never boring. Whether you enjoy Heads or Tails? is a coin toss, but you’ll sure think about it.

Heads or Tails? is now playing in select theaters and is also available on demand.