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‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ (Blu-ray review)

Paramount Pictures

Along with 1883 and 1923, Lawmen: Bass Reeves is the third period western miniseries from Yellowstone creator Tyler Sheridan.

The series was initially conceptualized as a side-story to series prequel 1883, but it morphed into a stand alone venture in pre-production.

Whereas 1883 builds its central conceit from the pioneer trail, and 1923 is more clearly related to later “psychological” westerns about land conflicts, Lawmen builds the spine of its story on the most famous of all Western tropes: the lawman on posse, looking to collect a bounty.

David Oyelowo stars as the titular Bass Reeves: a former slave who gained notoriety when he fought skillfully with a gun in his back in the Civil War, and then made a life for himself out in Indian Territory. When his new life is destroyed by a daring prison break, he catches the eye of a morally bankrupt marshal (played with real verve by Dennis Quaid).

As a result he’s deputized by the Judge of the Territory (another great bit part, this time by Donald Sutherland) as a U.S. Marshal and goes out on posse duty.

Let’s get the major issue out of the way now so I can focus on what I like about Lawmen, which is substantial. The major issue with Lawmen is that it’s an excellent 3 hour Western that has been stretched to 8 hours with the non-essential because the prestige miniseries was an easier format to sell than a feature film.

At some point in the development of this format, we’re going to get a generation of screenwriters who have trained to use it and do not simply take the first and third acts of their stories and stretch them into the first and final episodes of a season and then turn the middle of story into such a ridiculous shaggy dog story that even the director has to sublet those episodes out to an understudy out of boredom.

Lawmen has a very skilled and studied lead performance at its center from David Oyelowo. In a role that was going to invite comparison to the excellent central black performances in Tarantino’s westerns, Oyelowo brings a complexity and subtlety to Bass Reeves that not only feels authentic to the period but also feels couched in the work of James Stewart under Anthony Mann and Randolph Scott under Budd Boetticher– in other words it is classical.

In his review for NPR, Eric Deggans complains, among many other objections, that Reeves is so tight-lipped because it allows his white co-stars to monologue around him. What Deggans has missed in the subtext is that Reeves is precisely useful as an investigator because his background as a slave to a general gave him the discipline to observe human behavior and react quickly with a course of action that would keep him from being killed. He is assured that his current course is just, and so he is able to keep mostly silent (see: Shane, The Man from Laramie, Pale Rider et al.) as his companions or opposition air their own moral uncertainty– for what can one who believes in justice in such a world add to such dribble?

This is the crucible of what I respect most about Bass Reeves: the commitment to not simply bring a 2023 eye for problems backward or to cast its characters in 2023 modes, which would lend itself quickly to the kind of preachy sermons one may get anywhere else but to preserve the essence of the period: of hard people in an environs that wants them dead and how they deal with the small scale upending of the racial hierarchy that Bass Reeves must have represented. It must have been tempting to see in the character the same kind of anachronism that Jaime Foxx found to great effect in Django Unchained or Samuel L. Jackson found in The Hateful Eight where centuries old racism was confronted by a contemporary bravura.

Lawmen: Bass Reeves exhibits a little more discipline in carving out the possibility space for a black man who came of age in the 1860’s to come into his own as a peacemaker and lawgiver. Such a man is not likely to introduce systemic critiques from a century later into the saloons of two bit whiskey towns, or by the fire under the stars to a group of posse deputies who could be killed by a rattlesnake or a cattle rustler at any moment. If we’re going to ask for more representation in period stories, we must accept that these characters remain period characters, or you’re just simply asking for a single worldview, a single perspective, to be xeroxed to eternity across all media.

Lawmen has fat on the bone, yes. That said, its underlying commitment to be a real Western that can stand up to the greats from Ford to Eastwood should be commended, not pilloried for what it isn’t.

Recommended.

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