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TELEVISION REVIEW
A mild look at the wild West

Spielberg wheels out a civics lesson disguised as a miniseries

By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff | June 10, 2005

If ambition were enough, TNT's ''Into the West" would be a horse-operatic
masterpiece. It's a sprawling 12-hour miniseries about nothing less than
the White Man's drive westward across the 1800s and its impact on American
Indian life. Fitted with a cast of dozens, rocked by thunderous buffalo
stampedes, and filmed with an eye to wide cloud-strafed skies, it is
executive producer Steven Spielberg's massive effort to present American
history with a sense of cultural balance.

But ambition is the bane of ''Into the West," whose first of six two-hour
episodes premieres tonight at 8. The miniseries is lousy with breadth, and
woefully lacking in character shadings and distinctive dialogue. It's so in
love with the idea of being a TV epic that it forgets to paint in
personality details, the sort that make HBO's ''Deadwood" so vivid and
Dickensian. As the ''Into the West" narrative toggles between the generic
Wheeler brothers traveling West to settle and the Lakota tribe predictably
staving off assimilation, it's a flat canvas painted with too many broad
strokes.

At times, ''Into the West," with its stiff narration, comes dangerously
close to evoking the central-casting aesthetic of an educational film. You
know, something a teacher might screen in the AV room as summer rolls
around and the kids are getting antsy. Something that's good for you, and
politically correct as it tries to honor Native American visions and
language, but something that's not necessarily engaging. Like Spielberg's
similarly well-intentioned ''Amistad," it ends up as a wooden historical
record that's as fair as it is dull.

The central Wheeler is Jacob, who, like so many of the characters, is
played as unendingly virtuous. Everything Jacob (Matthew Settle) does in
the miniseries is a lesson for us in rectitude, as he turns up his nose at
liquor and women, for instance, or refuses to rat on a runaway slave. He
travels west from Virginia with the brave settler Jedidiah Smith (Josh
Brolin), and then later in a wagon train led by the eccentric Stephen Hoxie
(Beau Bridges). The train sequence, the centerpiece of episode two, is a
parade of everything that can possibly go wrong in rough terrain -- that
is, when it's not coming off like an episode of ''Here Come the Brides."
Keri Russell is also along for the caravan as Jacob's cousin Naomi, with
her pretty curls and her shaky Southern accent.

During Jacob's travels, he loses his romantic innocence but gains
fortitude, a Lakotan wife named Thunder Heart Woman (Tonantzin Carmelo), a
few children, and a love of nature. ''Everywhere I looked," Jacobs tells us
in his voice-over, ''I saw treasures of immeasurable beauty." Meanwhile, a
Lakotan boy who miraculously survived a buffalo stampede is named Loved by
the Buffalo and trained to become a magical leader. The story of Loved by
the Buffalo and the troubles of his tribesmen is interwoven with that of
the Wheelers. And as the miniseries moves between them, the script returns
repeatedly to its obvious metaphor of the wheel -- the wagon wheel versus
the medicine wheel.

Between 1825 and 1890, a lot went down in this country, as the American
identity was forged, for good and for ill. And yet, without the benefits of
moral complexity and psychological struggle, those years appear as
one-dimensional as they might look in a fat textbook, one called something
like ''Into the West."

By the way: That wheel metaphor? Don't be surprised if you see it on the
final exam.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@....

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