Man, that’s an unwieldy title. Sorry.
Many years ago, I worked third shift with an older guy named Les who loved movies as much as I did. Because we had a lot of downtime, we were able to bring in movies to watch, so we started broadening each other’s cinematic horizons. I’d keep Les up to date on the best of the new releases and he’d turn me on to quality older films like
The Manchurian Candidate and
Five Easy Pieces.
One of the ones he brought in was the
Lonesome Dove mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. As with all of his picks, it was as good as he’d said it would be and I’ve been curious ever since to check out the other stories in the saga. I couldn’t imagine any of them rivaling the original, but I love me a saga, so it’s always been back there in my head to try them out. Last winter,
Comanche Moon was on TV and completed the televised adaptations of the series. When the
Comanche Moon DVD was released, I figured it was as good a time as any to finally marathon the whole thing.
I wasn’t going to blog about it, because I really couldn’t think of a way to tie it in to my subject matter. But then I watched
Return to Lonesome Dove and met Agostina Vega. She’s a perfect example of an Action Girl, and she made me realize that there were also other – though less-obvious – examples all throughout the saga. As I’m exploring them though, keep in mind that I haven’t read any of
Larry McMurtry’s original novels. I’m basing all of this on the TV interpretations of them.
I chose to watch the series in the chronological order of when the stories take place. That means I started with
Dead Man’s Walk starring David Arquette as Gus McCrae and Jonny Lee Miller as Woodrow Call. Even though it had been a long time since I’d seen
Lonesome Dove (long enough that all I remembered was the basic, cattle-drive plot and the fate of Robert Urich’s character), I could tell that Arquette was trying to imitate Duvall more than he was trying to play the character. He did a good job of it though.
Jonny Lee Miller, in contrast, left the Tommy Lee Jones impressions alone and did a nice job just portraying the serious Call. He doesn’t start out all that serious in
Dead Man’s Walk, but there are hints at the perfectionism that later defines the character. And the incidents in the mini-series contribute to making him more serious and explain why Gus never succeeded in lightening him up any.
Dead Man’s Walk is about a group of Texas Rangers who eventually end up riding under the command of a former pirate (played by F. Murray Abraham) to take control of Mexican-held Santa Fe. I say “eventually” because it takes forever to get them to that point and a large part of the story is spent just covering the random wanderings of the Rangers as they fight a nasty Comanche warrior named Buffalo Hump. The meandering story and uninspired direction make it a difficult story to get through. In fact, if I hadn’t kept the re-watching of
Lonesome Dove as a carrot in front of me, I’m not sure I would’ve bothered to stick with
Dead Man’s Walk.
Even Edward James Olmos as a Mexican captain wasn’t as cool as he usually is. He plays a character who should’ve generated a lot of pathos, but doesn’t. I just never cared about him, or any of the other characters really. I thought some of them were pretty cool, but there was almost never any real emotional investment. The one exception was Patricia Childress as Matty Roberts, a prostitute who travels with the Rangers.
Matty’s the first person we see. She’s in a river, in her skivvies, and she’s carrying a large snapping turtle that she then uses to teach a lesson to a couple of customers who haven’t paid her in a while. Right there, you know Matty’s pretty cool. Her nickname “The Big Western” makes her even cooler, and we eventually learn that she’s got a great backstory too.
When bad things happen to Call, it’s Matty who takes care of him. She’s got an enormous heart and as tough as Call is, there wouldn’t be any more to his and Gus’ story without Matty. She’s unbelievably heroic in the face of everything she’s been through and has to go through in
Dead Man’s Walk. She doesn’t think she is, but she is.
The other main female character in
Dead Man’s Walk is Clara Forsythe (Jennifer Garner). Her father owns the general store in Austin where the Rangers are based. Gus immediately falls for her, but it’s not all that easy to see why. She’s pretty, but she teases him relentlessly and endlessly tries to flirt with an uninterested Call. It’s all to make Gus jealous and keep him on his toes, we figure, but it doesn’t make her an attractive character. Still, I suppose it’s believable that this young, wild woman will eventually become the more restrained, but equally strong version we meet later in the saga. And her tactics, cruel as they seem, do appear to work on Gus. We learn early on that he’s a philanderer, but Clara’s able to calm him down some and give him focus.
There’s one more woman in
Dead Man’s Walk who deserves a mention, even though she’s on screen for all of about five seconds. At the very end of the mini-series, Call’s heading into the general store just as a gorgeous young woman (Gretchen Mol from
3:10 to Yuma) is coming out. They exchange looks, but don’t talk, and it’s obvious that we’re supposed to know who she is from having already read or seen the sequels. I couldn’t remember her from
Lonesome Dove, but I figured I’d learn more about her in
Comanche Moon. I was right (though even then it was confusing, as I’ll explain next time), but having Call exchange glances with an unknown character without any follow-up was a strange way to end the mini-series.
Dead Man's Walk
gets two out of five turtle-wielding whores.
