Review: Deadwood: The Movie Brings Dubious Closure to a Venerable Series

If the movie has the ring of a high school or college reunion, that’s because that’s pretty much what it’s like.

Deadwood The Movie
Photo: Warrick Page/HBO

For three seasons, HBO’s Deadwood followed the eponymous gold rush settlement as it evolved throughout the 1870s from a lawless society into a town that would be subsumed into the Dakota Territory. In creator David Milch’s hands, Deadwood’s formation encapsulated America’s birth at large, which he unsentimentally understood to be born of killing, robbing, whoring, and backstage negotiations that were cleaned up by the press in articles that came to compose the country’s historical mythology.

In Deadwood, the primary difference between a powerful, legendary industrialist like George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) and a barroom gangster like Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) was one of reach. Hearst, the big bad of the show’s third season, cut a huge swath through America’s unsettled territories, uniting them into a society via his ruthless consolidation of land and resources. Al, however, contents himself with Deadwood, which he nearly lost to Hearst.

Deadwood, a parable of how politics sanitize the seizure of power for public consumption, isn’t so thematically different from most American westerns. What continues to distinguish the series is its pace and sense of detail. Detractors called it “slow,” as Milch dramatized how change sets into a society almost subliminally. A major plot point in the series, one that’s introduced quite casually, is the arrival of the telegraph technology into Deadwood. Even more significant is Al’s spurring of the camp to have elections, in order to encourage eventual American interlopers to leave the society’s infrastructure more or less alone.

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These elections are decided in Al’s bar, the Gem Saloon, over shots of whiskey and cans of peaches—as telling a portrait of the crony nature of politics as any that pop culture has offered. The show’s poetic dialogue suggests a fusion of Shakespeare and Dickens, and it illustrates how the citizens of Deadwood, even in repose, are performers. Al’s monologues, sometimes delivered while he’s receiving head and sometimes delivered directly to a disembodied head, show how the man must affirm his power to himself before going to battle.

Set in 1889, 10 years after the events of the third season, Deadwood: The Movie unites the show’s surviving characters, who’re celebrating the town’s induction into South Dakota. Initially, there’s pleasure to be had in watching Milch and director Daniel Minahan re-acclimate themselves to the setting, allowing the audience to see who remained in place for all those interim years, as well as who moved on to other pastures. Hearst—who left Deadwood after demanding the murder of Trixie (Paula Malcomson), a prostitute and one of Al’s most trusted confidants—has returned as a junior senator of California. Mrs. Ellsworth (Molly Parker), still in love with Marshall Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) is also back, having taking a once unimaginable train straight into Deadwood, with her now-grown adopted daughter, Sofia (Lily Keene), in tow. Meanwhile, Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), still very drunk, hostile, and lonely, returns to rekindle her love for Joanie Stubs (Kim Dickens), who now runs the upscale whorehouse the Bella Union, and who has once again succumbed to the sway of drugs.

If Deadwood: The Movie has the ring of a high school or college reunion, that’s because that’s pretty much what it’s like. After a long and promising wind-up, with characteristically gorgeous Milch dialogue, the movie reveals itself to be a shocking non-event that hews closely to the formula of a “very special episode” of a venerable series. There’s a wedding, there’s a funeral, and there’s a murder that’s telegraphed far advance, which effectively drains it of the impact of the show’s most upsetting and challenging acts of violence.

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The movie’s plot, when it finally emerges, is essentially a weak-tea reprisal of the conflict between Bullock and Hearst that drove large portions of the show’s third season. This time, Hearst wants Deputy Charlie Utter’s (Dayton Callie) land for building telephone lines, and Bullock once again chafes at the giant’s tyranny. Trixie once again can’t keep her mouth shut, so she once again finds herself at the center of Hearst’s wrath, while her lover, Sol Star (John Hawkes), once again attempts to soothe her with his dull sincerity.

Milch and Minahan fall prey, in a fashion, to the Marvel syndrome, striving so hard to give the audience glimpses of each and every beloved character that they forget to mount a living and breathing, truly present-tense narrative. Aiming for a nostalgic ruefulness in the vein of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Milch shortchanges his show’s greatest attributes. The backstage plotting that was the meat of Deadwood—the secret meetings at the Gem, the maneuverings with the press and with spies such as hotel manager E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson)—are largely missing from the movie, and Al is, astonishingly, rendered beside the point. Suffering from a bad liver, probably due to his alcoholism, Al trades a few characteristically profane aphorisms with Hearst and Bullock while almost literally hanging back and watching the events unfold from the bleachers. (Even Al’s hobbling feels like a repeat, of Deadwood’s second season, where he was sick with kidney stones.)

For all the complaining of the open ending that was left in the show’s wake, it concluded on a disturbing and suggestive recurring image, with Al once again mopping blood up off the floors of the Gem, blood which belonged to an innocent. In this context, the ending echoes the conclusion of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, as both productions ended with amoral people committing actions that revealed the true extent of their capacity for self-preservation. The show’s suspended conclusion was actually perfect, elucidating the cycles of carnage that broker a society. A true ending, giving viewers the closure they often yearn, would’ve been at odds with Milch’s point: that societies will endlessly demand sacrifices of various scales (almost exclusively from the lower and middle classes) in order to maintain the imbalance of power that fuels their existence. Unless we redefine the notion of society itself, there will be no reprieve from this fact. In other words, no closure.

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Early portions of Deadwood: The Movie complement the show’s ending, illustrating the pretenses of civility that are built atop savagery. Fans of the series may find the pastoral images of the movie’s first act to be ironic and chilling, and Callie’s lovely performance brings to the fore a sense of longing and compromise. But the reheated Hearst melodrama effectively kills this subtext, as Milch and Minahan offer an unearned impression of closure. Hearst is jailed at the end of the movie, but anyone even passingly acquainted with American history may be inclined to ask “So what?” given Hearst’s lasting cultural influence. This development also embodies the movie’s weird and unwelcome sentimentality, as many of the show’s killers, especially Al, are informed here with a kind of autumnal cuddliness. The series ended with the cleaning of a violent aftermath, while the movie concludes with a close-up of hands holding. Honestly, which image is more intrinsically American?

Score: 
 Cast: Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, Gerald McRaney, Molly Parker, Paula Malcomson, John Hawkes, Anna Gunn, Dayton Callie, Brad Dourif, Robin Weigert, W. Earl Brown, William Sanderson, Kim Dickens, Sean Bridgers, Keone Young, Geri Jewell, Lily Keene  Network: HBO  Buy: Amazon

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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