An Old West Saga, Told From Both Sides

From: The New York Times, 6/10/2005
by: Alessandra Stanley

The first Indian massacre on "Into the West" is committed by a herd of stampeding buffalo, not by vigilantes or the United States cavalry.

The first scalping of a frontiersman is the work of a grizzly bear, not of an Indian brave on the warpath.

Nature is the most fearsome enemy - and coveted prize - in TNT's six-part miniseries about Western expansion, which begins tonight. And that is not a bad canvas for an epic that seeks to sidestep cowboy-and-Indian clichés and deliver a richer portrait of Manifest Destiny. The taming of the wilderness is the nation's founding paradox; the pioneers' struggle forged the nation's character but their ethnic cleansing of American Indians indelibly stained it. "Into the West" tries to weave that dissonance into an otherwise fairly conventional multigenerational family saga.

The Western landscape is depicted in all its complexity on "Into the West." Characters, and there are scores of them, are more one-dimensional. The mini-series is a sprawling, rollicking tale that spans 1825 to 1891, including wagon trains, the gold rush, the Transcontinental railroad and the Battle of Wounded Knee. And along the way, the film's protagonists encounter every possible adversity: amputation, smallpox, cholera, massacre, rape, murder, alcoholism and Indian reservations.

There are some stunning visual effects, none more arresting than an early scene in which Lakota hunters trick a herd of buffalo into tumbling off a cliff. But "Into the West" falls short of both "Deadwood" on HBO and CBS's legendary 1989 mini-series "Lonesome Dove."

The TNT western works so hard at compressing history into a family melodrama that it forgets to fill out the family members.

There are lots of cameos, but no characters anywhere near as compelling as Ian McShane's Al Swearengen on "Deadwood" or Robert Duvall's Gus McCrae in "Lonesome Dove." TNT forgot to heed the warning of one of the series's protagonists, Jedediah Smith (Josh Brolin): "The West is a place on the map; it's not a way to be."

The mini-series is not dead, but it is a risky enterprise in the age of shrunken attention spans and boundless television choices. ABC chose the sleepy summer season to broadcast its six-part series "Empire," set in Julius Caesar's Rome and beginning later this month, and its episodes are only one hour long. (HBO's 12-part take on antiquity, "Rome," begins in the fall.)

The two-hour episodes of "Into The West," to be shown over six consecutive weekends, make up perhaps the most ambitious mini-series in the TNT repertory of successful westerns. Steven Spielberg is the executive producer, and each episode has different guest stars and a different director, from Simon Wincer, who directed "Lonesome Dove," to Timothy Van Patten, whose credits include "The Sopranos" and "The Wire."

The story was created by one author, William Mastrosimone ("Sinatra"), but three other writers worked on three of the scripts. The mini-series has so many credits that it is a bit reminiscent of "Naked Came the Stranger," a soft-core 1969 novel famous for having a different author for each chapter.

Every episode of "Into The West" tries to keep a fair balance between the Indians and the white settlers. The series begins with Loved by the Buffalo (Simon R. Baker), a young hunter with a gift for prophecy, and his siblings in a Lakota village in 1825, a time when tribes still hunted buffalo across prairies unmolested by pioneers or ranchers.

Their story is told in juxtaposition with that of Jacob Wheeler (Matthew Settle), the dreamy son in a large family of a Virginia wheelwright. When a rough-looking mountain man, James Fletcher (Will Patton), arrives at the family workshop, talking of peril and high adventure out West. (He wears an Indian scalp on his belt as a trophy.) Jacob is beguiled and runs away to seek his fortune. From then on, the fate of Jacob and his clan unfold on a parallel track with the Lakota dynasty.

The parity is more conscientious than creative: Indian brothers fall out over how to resist the white invaders; frontier brothers fall out over how to resist gold-rush greed. Jacob rescues a young Lakota, Thunder Heart Woman (Tonantzin Carmelo), from sexual slavery; his cousin Naomi (Keri Russell) is rescued from sexual slavery by Prairie Fire (Jay Tavare), a handsome Lakota tribesman.

Throughout, there is a studied effort to flip television western clichés: The first alcoholic beverage served is not a jug of "firewater" whiskey, but an Indian drink that a tribe in the Montana Territory offers a gang of quickly intoxicated pelt traders. (Later, of course, the treacherous hospitality is reversed: white traders pay Lakota hunters in whiskey, not guns.)

"Into The West," is deeply respectful of the Indian experience - the characters speak in indigenous languages, which are translated in subtitles - but the tribute to the Lakota turns out to be mostly stifling. Most of the tribal conversation consists of dire predictions of doom at the hands of the white invaders; the individual personalities remain as noble and static as the chief in the 1971 anti-pollution ad featuring the "crying Indian."

The meatier drama revolves around Jacob and his family, and even he is not a richly-imagined protagonist - he has hair-raising adventures, but his personality (decent, adventurous) stays fixed.

"Into the West" has all the elements of a good western, without the deeper texture that would make it great.