In the catalog of the modern western, a lot of space is given to stories focused on what is assumed to have been the sheer miserableness of life on the frontier. Viscous carpets of mud. Frigid snowscapes. Scalpings. Rapes. The sibilant impact of arrows puncturing flesh.
The eye-catching Netflix mini-series “American Primeval” (premiering Thursday) contains all of those in its six episodes, and more horrors besides: marauding wolves gnawing through cabin walls; a whipping by a sadistic militiaman; encounters with crazed and arrogant Frenchmen. It has a particular fetish for bloody animal carcasses, which are hung, skinned, drained and boiled with regularity. The odors are unimaginable.
Mark L. Smith, who created and wrote “American Primeval,” has an affinity for the western as a bad dream; he and Alejandro G. Iñárritu wrote the revenge saga “The Revenant,” which revolved around a mauling by a grizzly bear. It’s as if Smith’s fascination with the endurance shown by those who took on the Old West leads him to create endurance tests for his audiences.
Like “The Revenant,” “American Primeval” is loosely based on actual events, in this case the Utah War of 1857-58, when settlers belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints formed militias and took up arms, gingerly, against the United States. Historical figures like the frontier entrepreneur Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), who was also a prominent character in “The Revenant,” and the Latter-day Saints leader Brigham Young (Kim Coates) have large roles.
It’s a period when settlers, displaced tribes and the United States Army all skirmished for land and authority in the recently established Utah Territory. And Smith wants to use it as a stage for something sprawling and meaningful — the latest pronouncement on how savage the supposedly civilized become when the chips are down. An Army captain played by Lucas Neff supplies the mandatory poetic narration: “I have come to believe that these lands possess forces that we civilized are not able to defend against.”
What you need to make a revisionist-epic western work, though, is some real poetry — at least a hint of the kind of vision that informed “The Searchers” or “The Return of a Man Called Horse” or “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” works that “American Primeval” apes but can’t echo.
The director Peter Berg manages the gunfights and trail rides proficiently, and the cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Into the Wild”) provides a washed-out, blue-gray look that is handsome if not particularly distinctive for this kind of story. The aerial shots of wintry mountain vistas are monotonous yet unfailingly pleasing.
But after some vivid early scenes when a mother and son, Sara and Devin Rowell (Betty Gilpin and Preston Mota), ride into the harrowing squalor of Bridger’s outpost seeking a guide to take them farther west, “American Primeval” is mostly dead on the page. There’s not enough excitement in the ideas, and there’s not enough thought in the storytelling.
What’s left is the sometimes orgiastic brutality — no different from the violence in the kind of low-rent entertainment “American Primeval” wants to separate itself from — and the manifold formulas of the western. With the exception of Whigham’s puckish, entertaining Bridger, the trappers, soldiers, bounty hunters and militiamen feel like extras from one Sam Peckinpah film or another. The Shoshone and Paiute characters, meanwhile, are solemnly noble or dangerously impassioned but invariably humorless.
The clichés compound as the Rowells head into the mountains with a reluctant guide, Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch, who starred in Berg’s wonderful series “Friday Night Lights”), and a runaway Native American girl, Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier, who is the show’s most expressive performer even though her character is mute).
This bunch is carrying a lot more baggage than just blankets and hardtack, and its weight falls on the weary viewer. Sara, in particular, has issues that have followed her west from Pennsylvania and put her and Devin in constant danger. Unfortunately for Gilpin, the script works this out in ways that make Sara seem less like an imperiled 19th-century woman on the run than an exasperating and dangerously clueless Karen.
Kitsch’s skill at playing bottled-up anguish and ardor is what his role should call for, but Isaac is a strong-and-silent caricature, too hollow to give Kitsch very much to communicate. It doesn’t help that the story is overstuffed and overcomplicated, circling back and forth from the fugitives’ flight to the jockeyings of the settlers and the Army to the plight of the Shoshone. (A clearer understanding of the geography, and a fuller explanation of the historical context, would help, but neither is provided.)
A tighter focus on either the relationship between Sara and Isaac or on the Utah War might have allowed for a more coherent emotional and thematic arc, though at half the length. As it is, Smith juices the story in the later episodes by going weird (those Grand Guignol Frenchmen) and by breaking with the historical record in ways that may bemuse the average viewer but will likely displease any Latter-day Saints who have made it that far.
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