A Deadwood listicle!

What makes the western so intriguing and just straight-up instructive is its purity, a word I am loath to employ. But "purity" gets at how the western boils down the complexity of a nation state to its scrappy origins (and yes, that includes the lies told about said origins). No zip/tax codes, no gerrymandering, no urban planning, sometimes no dwellings of any sort, e.g., The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953), none of the contrivances of modernity that obscure like cobwebs the socio-legal carving up of space. The western is so spare that, at its best, it forces you to ponder why you are sitting where you are right now, a land acknowledgement avant la lettre. 

The benefit of a western series is that it has time to trace the processes by which initial land grabs congeal into a modern nation state. And HBO's Deadwood is peerless in that category. Despite the coruscating personalities on display (Al Swearengen is as attractive/repulsive as Tony Soprano), Deadwood makes it easy for once to think in the macro, to swerve away from the micro concerns of the characters and ponder the changes wrought by the newspaper, the railroad, the telegraph, etc. The latter accoutrements threaten to bring not only law and order but transformations in consciousness the residents of Deadwood could never have foreseen. My favorite moment in this regard is one lasting not even a minute, as evanescent as a stranger passed on the street. 

In Season 3, Episode 9: "Amateur Night," Samuel Fields (Franklyn Ajaye) visits the bank on his way out of town. He's chatting with owner/teller Alma Ellsworth (Molly Parker) but a line of customers has formed behind him. Alma eyes the line with concern as Fields babbles on. "I got a life to live of my own," he tells her. "As do all here in the camp," Alma responds tartly, causing Fields to notice at last the impatient customers snaking to the rear. "Sorry to hold you all up," he says sheepishly as he makes his exit. In an urban context, this exchange would prove too banal to narrativize. But to the denizens of a burgeoning 1870s town, waiting in close proximity to strangers is a new phenomenon requiring significant adjustments in expectations and behavior. It might even take on the contours of a novelty as it shades into loitering, a development which causes the ever-irascible Trixie (Paula Malcomson) to complain, "A lot of shitbags hang around a bank. Did you ever fuckin' notice?"

In short, Deadwood serves as the Prestige TV version of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's landmark 1977 tome The Railway Journey. As such, it doesn't lend itself well to listicling. The transformation of "our very perceptual experience of nature itself," to quote Wiki, takes precedence over individual gripes and local skirmishes. But below is an attempt to schematically rattle off the lows and highs of the series.

What's Bad About Deadwood (not much!):

1. Native Americans are, at best, a structured absence in Deadwood. The most prominent Native American character is a severed head in a box which Al uses for autotherapy like Yorick. Local tribes could have at least populated the margins as an ironic presence à la Beau Travail. Or they could have functioned as a nagging reminder of the bloody conquest of nature at the hands of white settlers.

2. Creator David Milch did not know what to do with his women characters. Once free of their respective pimps, Trixie and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) are unmoored and never self-actualized. Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) should have been in every episode (see below). Alma has nothing to do in the 13-years-aborning movie. Etc.

3. Viewers could have used more glimpses of the indifferent Deadwood public along the lines of the bank scene described above. We know controlling the newspaper and, later, the wire is crucial for Al. But scenes of the public reading the paper would have driven home that importance.

4. No fault of Milch (from what I gather) but ending the series with Season 3 in 2006 left us unmoored. And while Deadwood: The Movie (Daniel Minahan, 2019) was a welcome wrap up, it came off as a preposterously tardy half-measure more than anything.

What's Great About Deadwood (not much!):

1. Every damn thing else!

Other notes:

Best character: Calamity Jane (below), easily. Robin Weigert, we are not worthy of your ability to remain barky and hammered for so long.

Character I initially hated but came to appreciate because he was so crucial to the narrative(s): E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson). What a worm, though!

Character who improbably turned out to be a hottie: Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver)

Obviously essential character but one who remained a usually inert cipher: Sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant)

Ian McShane as Al let off most of the fireworks but don't sleep on this astonishing performance: Powers Boothe as Cy Tolliver

Time it would take you in each episode to require the emergency room if you took a shot every time some variation of "fuck" or even ("cocksucker") was uttered throughout the showy, Shakespearean dialogue: 20 minutes tops and that's a conservative estimate. More like 10 depending on the alcohol and one's tolerance.

Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989)

Typical Hollywood fundamental attribution error whereby race relations exist solely on the level of the individual, here a Jewish Southerner (Jessica Tandy) who overcomes her folksy racism by befriending her Black chauffeur (Morgan Freeman). The film has more trenchant things to say about aging than race. But it's all done up so politely, so anonymously that it's near impossible to remember even basic plot points a month later. 

Far more fascinating is the abyss of a career that is Bruce Beresford's filmography. Driving Miss Daisy was the first Best Picture winner since (coughs) Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) which did not receive a Best Director nomination. The slight seems appropriate given how Beresford never rose above hackdom. He managed a romantic comedy called Her Alibi starring Tom Selleck and Paulina Porizkova (which Maltin called "amiable but awkwardly directed") the same year Daisy was released. But I have not even heard of a single one of his post-Daisy titles, from 1990's Mister Johnson all the way up to 2018's Ladies in Black. And even though Daisy cleaned up at the box office in a big way ($145.8 million on a $7.5 million budget according to Box Office Mojo), almost every one of these films lost money, sometimes lots of money. Sole exception: 1999's Double Jeopardy, an Ashley Judd vehicle lost in the morass of thrillers she was starring in at the time.

Grade: B 

Belfast (Kenneth Branagh, 2021)

I expected something dull and prestigious and got laughably awful instead. Kenneth Branagh's semi-autobiographical account of his upbringing in Belfast is the Soccer Mummy of war-seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-child films. It takes place during the Troubles which you hear about mostly via the telly. But because Branagh locks into all the corny beats of the genre so rigidly, the conflict could be the Vietnam War, WWII, the Hundred Years' War. Check off all the hallmarks as they pass before you. Black and white to show he means it, man. Color travelogue shots of Eire. Van Morrison choking the soundtrack. Young boy gaining confidence with a girl (how else are we to know when the film is coming to an end?). Grandma and grandpa dancing to the songs of old. Shoplifting as first ritual into adulthood. The nadir comes during the climactic stand off between the lead local rioter and lead dad Jamie Dornan scored to the Tex Ritter theme for High Noon which the family were watching on the telly earlier on. Or was the nadir Dornan's out-of-nowhere karaoke performance of "Everlasting Love"? 

Grade: D

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Near the beginning of his BFI monograph on On the Waterfront, Leo Braudy writes, "it is tempting to argue that naming names before the HUAC put Kazan into a moral and psychological quandary that paradoxically made him a better director." (8). That may be so. But film history would have survived, and then some, had Kazan kept his quandary to himself and, Abraham Polonsky, whose career was destroyed by the HUAC, been allowed to continue writing and directing masterpieces like Force of Evil (1948), a far superior film than anything Kazan ever achieved and featuring the greatest screenplay in Hollywood history.

So while Braudy offers a welcome refresher on the more immediate subject matter of corruption within the longshoremen's union, that does not negate the fact that On the Waterfront remains easy to read as an apologia for naming names. The structure of apology supersedes any contemporary muckraking into corrupt unions. Or as V.F. Perkins put it in Film as Film, "[t]he personal story overwhelms the political morality-play" (146).

Even at that, though, a director for whom casting is 90% of the art of cinema, as Kazan admitted, will always come off too messagey, actorly, and middlebrow for my tastes. For those who find Rear Window inferior to On the Waterfront, feel free to cluck along with Braudy's assertion that "[c]asting therefore was a crucial element in Kazan's preparation for a film, a procedure totally unlike, say, Hitchcock's, in which the director's total vision of the film dictated a more condescending attitude towards the actors as objects themselves" (45). Me, I'll take Hitch's vulgar Freudianism, breaking the fourth wall, and genius last shot any day.

Still, Brando's performance is for the ages, as if that were ever in doubt. When Terry confesses that "I don't like the country. The crickets make me nervous," he ain't heavy; he's my brother. 

Grade: B+

Other Hollywood films which deserved the Best Picture Oscar much more than On the Waterfront: er, Rear Window, Track of the Cat, Bait, The Other Woman, The Barefoot Contessa, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, A Star is Born, Johnny Guitar, Silver Lode, and such ineligible avant-garde shorts as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Gyromorphosis, Evolution, Form Phases IV, etc. I assume Anatahan was ineligible too but if not, throw that on the list as well.

Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967)

I'm in a tailspin when I find myself agreeing with Pauline Kael instead of Dave Kehr. Kehr calls Two for the Road "arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece" (oooh let's argue) whereas in 5,001 Nights at the Movies, Kael accurately targets "tedious running jokes" and concludes "the facile, comic bits set off audience expectations that are then betrayed, and the clever, bitter stuff just seems sour." For me, Two for the Road goes in my fundamental attribution error category not because the film commits it per se but because its obsessive focus on the heterosexual couple to the detriment of all other considerations contributes to the environment in which such errors are committed. 

For many, that's Two for the Road's most winning quality. In Danny Peary's Cult Movies, Henry Blinder praises screenwriter Frederic Raphael's "desire to create a film in which characters would simply 'live their lives'...[and] avoid, as much as possible, having characters that would represent anything: not the 'impossibility of human communications,' not the 'desirability of the married state.'" If that sounds compelling to you or even at all unique (don't most mainstream Hollywood films operate this way?), then you're free to find yourself in Audrey and Albert's cutesy, temporally jumbled, exquisitely costumed foibles. Me, I'll stick with Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Palm Beach Story, both of which imagine wider, richer contexts beyond their characters' most immediate self-regard.

Grade: B-minus

The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996)

The English Patient feels alternately bloated and rushed. I'm still not certain what motivates Hana (Juliette Binoche) to hunker down in a war-ravaged monastery with her "English patient" Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) beyond a mere narrative contrivance, i.e., the ploy allows Almásy to convey his story. But then why give her a romance with sexy Kip (Naveen Andrews) 90 minutes into the film? Their scenes feel clipped and unsatisfying, needlessly expanding the running time to 162 damn minutes.

And then there's the pernicious fundamental attribution error that so much popular cinema commits. Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas) calls for "an Earth without maps" as her dying wish. A beautiful wish (although so much avant-garde art achieves that goal). But immediately before, she intones, "We’re the real countries. Not the boundaries drawn on maps, the names of powerful men." No, in fact, we're the products of particular sociohistorical moments, shaped, if not created, by borders and the psychoses of those in power. To pretend otherwise is to honor a solipsism that renders Almásy's climactic decision (surrendering maps to the Germans in order to save Katharine) a monumental act of self-absorption rather than a heroic feat in the face of inconceivable atrocities. One terrific Hollywood film that does display how government machinations impact our everyday interactions: Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987).

Still, I dug the corny three-day trek through the desert as well as Almásy and Katharine boinking while a party sings "Silent Night" inches away. And I loved when Kip sends Hana up a rope with a flare to look at the paintings on the monastery wall (although couldn't she see them in the daylight?). Finally, gorgeous as Almásy was, I'd rather party with Katharine's husband Geoffrey (Colin Firth), boisterous and fun where Almásy was cranky (and less lustworthy than Julian Wadham's Madox).

Grade: B-minus