Once Gideon finds temporary shelter with a pioneer family, Seraphim Falls softens into a meticulously illustrated historical diorama, punctuated with spasms of violence. He encounters a gang of callow bank robbers, then hides out in a wagon train of Mormon settlers and comes upon a camp of laborers on the transcontinental railroad. Wherever he goes, Carver follows in his footsteps.
The movie Seraphim Falls most resembles is Clint Eastwood's 1976 classic The Outlaw Josey Wales; it follows that film's story closely enough to qualify as a self-conscious homage.
Late in the game, Seraphim Falls takes a fatal left turn from the solemn into the ridiculous. On the way to their final confrontation, Gideon and Carver each encounter lone symbolic figures who seem to have been awaiting their arrival, each offering a vaguely Satanic bargain. The first is an Indian trader with a slippery smile. The second, Madame Louise (Anjelica Huston in her grifter mode), is a haughty, witchlike peddler in a horse-drawn carriage, hawking an alcoholic cure-all.
With all due respect to Jim Jarmusch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, tossing such hallucinatory curveballs into the movie this near the end may look like a stroke of avant-garde brilliance, but it's really an act of cowardice.
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