Deadwood: the Movie review: a disappointing return for this once-great Western

It used to be ageing rock stars who were most susceptible to the “putting the band back together” impulse. Now it’s TV companies. In the past few years, we’ve had The X-Files (disappointing), Roseanne (disappointing), Gilmore Girls (disappointing) and now we have a movie-length Deadwood (damn, you guessed it). Recapturing old glories don’t come easy.

Of all of the above adored originals, David Milch’s Wild West masterpiece probably had the most to lose. It had wrestled its way into the canon of greatest TV dramas over three series from 2004-7. Admittedly, it appeared to borrow heavily from Pete Dexter’s superb 1986 novel of the same name (a must-read), which Milch claimed never to have opened. But when it first arrived on our screens, Deadwood ripped up the template for what a Western could be.

Milch’s characters spoke to each other in a strange, formal tongue that produced lines such as, “The man I once was, Al, was not formidable, and I am but his shadow now.” Everyone seemed to be bad, or at least selfishly driven by their own needs and desires, whatever the cost. It was cruel and violent, rude and funny. In short, it seemed to have all the restless, pioneer, gold-lust energy that would have filled a semi-lawless mining town in South Dakota in the Old West.

And, of course, Deadwood was a real town, bursting with newcomers after gold was discovered in Deadwood Gulch, in territory belonging to the Sioux, in 1875. Ian McShane’s towering performance as saloon and brothel owner Al Swearengen depicted a real-life pimp and bar owner, who had thrived in Deadwood during the period, when he built and ran the Gem Saloon and forced desperate young women into prostitution. Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) was a real-life hotel owner and US marshal.

But what gave the town its enduring, if infamous, place in American history was that it really was where the gunfighter, gambler and showman Wild Bill Hickok was murdered, in 1876 – a major element of the plot of the first series. The real-life Calamity Jane was living in Deadwood at the time. George Hearst, the rapacious businessman in Milch’s work, was a mine owner, later US Senator, and also the father of William Randolph Hearst, the wealthy press baron who would be satirised in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. The town of Deadwood was a gift for a dramatist like Milch, the co-creator of long-running cop drama NYPD Blue.

But right from the start of this nearly two-hour standalone movie, it felt as though the show’s original energy had dissipated. Amid the splendour of the Dakota Hills, Calamity Jane was winding her way towards the town on horseback, drunk, the first words out of her mouth, “10 years gone… ’fore eyes close once ’n’ all, I’d once again see my Joanie Stubbs.” If you were a fan of the show, you’d know that their romantic relationship had been a feature of the series, and Milch was trying to get us back up to speed. But this sense of returning to all of its original characters, instead of injecting new energy, new characters, new threats alongside them, felt at best nostalgic and sentimental, at worst tired. Molly Parker’s Alma Garrett was soon getting off a train, too, still with a twinkle in her eye for Sheriff Bullock. And Gerald McRaney’s George Hearst was back in town as well, with a yen to plant telephone poles across the state.

Back in the day, Hearst had employed the prostitute-murdering geologist Francis Wolcott, paid to have miners who wanted to join a union killed, chopped off Swearengen’s middle finger and had Alma’s husband assassinated. So, of course, he had to be there, to receive his retribution, while providing additional justification for it, in paying to have the likeable Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) offed. This Deadwood had dissolved into goodies and baddies, and Milch wanted to give the show the closure that it had been denied when it was originally cancelled. Some will have been happy with that, but it all felt so inevitable.

Even the new characters that did arrive seemed to be lacking in drive, such as the young woman whose ambition seemed to reach its apogee in seducing an even-more grizzled Swearengen (the now 76-year-old McShane), then tell him how much he reminded her of her father. Yuck!

McShane is not always brilliant in everything, but the foul-mouthed, booze-soaked, Machiavellian Swearengen fitted him like a glove, and admittedly it was a treat to see the two reunited. Olyphant, too, has a convincing inner moral sense that would receive full play here. But for a newcomer, Deadwood would have been hard to follow, even with the many inserted flashbacks to events past, and hard to get worked up about. This was mostly one for the dedicated fan, who remembered all the old songs. Some things are better left undone.