http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-intothewest10jun10,0,7996483.story?tra
ck=widget

June 10, 2005

TELEVISION REVIEW
Feast for the eyes, famine for the ears

*TNT’s "Into the West" is lovely to behold, and it captures the Old West,
but there’s a cacophony of corn and clichιs.

By Robert Lloyd, Times Staff Writer

The first and possibly most important thing to say about "Into the West,"
the Steven Spielberg-produced six-part dramatic Critique of Manifest
Destiny (beginning tonight on TNT) is that it is extraordinarily beautiful
to behold.

Expanses of unspoiled scenery — Canada, mostly, standing in for what we are
pleased to call "America" — of grassy plains and snowy mountains and green
woods and wide rivers, all under a multicolored performing sky, have been
filmed in a way that lets the viewer apprehend something of their real
proportions and grandeur. (With television so full of indifferent video
images — wide-angled, over-bright and full of information but lacking art —
this is no small gift.)

Even indoors, the impression is always of natural light and authentic
space. As shot by William Wages and Alan Caso, it's a show that makes
owning one of them there big-screen televisions seem like a right fine
idea.

On the other hand, nothing else in the production is as good as it looks.
(At least not in the three episodes available for review.) Watch with the
sound down and you'll miss nothing of substance — and you'll avoid the
score, which is a field of old Hollywood corn of the sort the executive
producer famously finds tasty. This is due in part to its visual
sophistication but also to scripts that stick fairly close to the surface:
Forced to illustrate history, the characters are converted to cliches.
(William Mastrosimone wrote the story, and three of the six screenplays.)
It's a sort of checklist drama — everything that could possibly happen on a
wagon train, for example (accident fording a river, child killed by
rampaging bison, cholera, storm, Indian attack, leg crushed by runaway
wagon), will happen, one incident following almost comically close upon
another. The whole series has that feel: Some well-written, well-played
scenes come by now and again — a prairie proposal, a disastrous parlay
between Indians and cavalry over an escaped cow — but they come on all of a
sudden, do their quick business and just as suddenly depart.

Wearing its obviously thorough research on its buckskin sleeve — this is a
show, one might say, ripped from the pages of history — and as scrupulous
as it can be within its small-screen means, the series is a victim of its
own ambitions. In rushing around to cover the many bases of life on the
frontier, over a period of 65 years — we are continually being kicked two
years, six years into the future, by narration or title card — neither the
characters nor the pieces of history they represent are deeply explored.
Earnest without being terribly enlightening, full of action but
dramatically inert, it's like a very long, expensive, semi-star-studded
educational film.

The story divides its attention between the Wheelers (formerly) of
Virginia, specifically the conveniently peripatetic Jacob (Matthew Settle
to begin with, John Terry later), who goes wherever the writers need him
to, and the Lakota tribe who will become his in-laws. (The Lakota fare
better, dramatically if not historically, as they get to pretty much stay
in the same place.) It's "How the West Was Won, or Lost, Depending on Your
Point of View." We meet mountain men and trappers, abolitionists,
prospectors, runaway slaves and free men of color, Pony Express riders,
preachers, soldiers and impresarios.

For their part, the Indians demonstrate their bison-based lifestyle, their
oneness with nature, their medicine wheel and vision quest and sun dance,
and also their interest in obtaining rifles and whiskey. Unpreviewed
episodes will involve the building of the railroads, the rise of the
merchant class, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills — the milieu of
"Deadwood" — the meeting of Crazy Horse and Custer at Little Bighorn and
the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee that effectively ended the Indian Wars.
To cover all this territory requires a degree of narrative coincidence that
would make Dickens blush.

Another problem is that while the film aims to communicate historical
truths, to tell what's usually not told, to straighten the record, it's
also a Western, which is to say, it's invested in the myths the movies have
helped make. This, in part, is what makes it so easy to read. Indeed, the
history of film is bound up with the West, from "The Great Train Robbery"
to "Stagecoach" to "The Wild Bunch" to "Unforgiven" and "Dead Man." (So is
the history of television, for that matter, though in recent years TNT has
been more or less the sole keeper of the flame — until "Deadwood.") Indeed,
you can divine the story of any generation in the westerns it makes, in the
degree to which it celebrates or punctures the myths of the frontier.

These warring impulses — to tell history and to make a movie, to honor the
past and sentimentalize it at the same time — keep "Into the West" from
really getting a hold of either sort of truth, actual or invented. The film
has also been written from the point of view of a time when the dismal
record of the white men in the Old West, as regards the people who were
there first, is commonly acknowledged, and it creates its heroes and
villains according to what a modern audience would approve or disapprove,
not according to the prevailing attitudes of the time, a time in which
people of otherwise goodwill were happy to regard the Indian nations as
something less than human.

When the film does address that attitude it cheats: When beautiful Keri
Russell (TV's "Felicity"), who has earlier expressed such a sentiment, is
captured by the Cheyenne, she is lucky enough to be given to handsome
Prairie Fire (Jay Tavare) as a wife and not, say, Weak Flame That Will Not
Catch. And though she resists him at first, reciting nursery rhymes as a
charm against him — one of the screenplay's best inspirations — it's a
union we can approve, as a movie audience, as she eventually does herself.

Still, it is something to see. (A trip to Calgary might be better, though
less convenient and more expensive than basic cable.) For if the story
feels forced, the production is convincing — I can't swear to its accuracy,
but as an illusion, at least, it works.

Notwithstanding some computer-animated bison that have more in them of
"Jurassic Park" than of Yellowstone National, even the digital additions
contribute to the sense that one is getting a real glimpse of another place
and another time: The world before there were so many of us in it. And
that's a trip worth taking.

'Into the West'

Where: TNT

When: 8 tonight

Ratings: TV-14-LV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with
advisories for coarse language and violence)

Matthew Settle...Jacob Wheeler

Skeet Ulrich...Jethro Wheeler

Michael Spears...Dog Star

Tonantzin Carmelo...Thunder Heart Woman

George Leach...Loved by the Buffalo (older)

Simon R. Baker...Loved by the Buffalo (young)

Zahn McClarnon...Running Fox

Josh Brolin...Jedediah Smith

Executive producer Steven Spielberg. First episode: Director Robert
Dornhelm. Writer William Mastrosimone.