Into The West ...

Two things are evident early into the first episode of this sprawling six-part miniseries that follows the intertwined fortunes of two mid-19th century American families. First, the drama aims to be uplifting family-friendly entertainment. There's not a smidgen of the cynicism and profanity of HBO's popular "revisionist" Western Deadwood. And
second, as a saga of Native American culture and diaspora during the Euro-American conquest of the West, it is remarkably ambitious, even more so than Kevin Costner's Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves. With Steven Spielberg as executive producer, acclaimed writer William Mastrosimone as principal author, six directors, a large cast of both veteran and new-coming actors, and a cadre of Native American advisors to promote authenticity, Into the West truly earns its label as "event television."

Episode 1, scripted by Mastrosimone and directed by Robert Dornhelm, establishes the central visual motif: the circle. A wheel will appear to White Feather, a Lakota boy on the Western plains, in a vision foretelling immense hardships for his people. Half a continent away in Virginia, two generations of wheelwrights, named The Wheelers, are weathering an economic depression. When the dreamer of the family, Jacob (Matthew Settle), meets a fur-trading mountain man (Will Patton), who regales him with tales of trailblazer Jebediah Smith (Josh Brolin), young Wheeler sees his own future. Soon, he and brother Nathan (Alan Tudyk) saddle up to join Smith's band on a trek to California.

Out west, White Feather is miraculously saved from a stampede by the spirit of a departed elder during his clan's annual hunt for buffalo. His village recognizes this as a gift and he is launched on the path to become a shaman, renamed Loved by the Buffalo (Simon R. Baker). He embarks on a vision quest, allowing the dramatic focus gradually to shift to his older brothers Dog Star (Michael Spears) and Running Fox (Zahn McClarnon) and sister Thunder Heart Woman (Tonantzin Carmelo). When a white trader buys Thunder Heart Woman for marriage, the union continues the circular motif of possession, dispossession and repossession. This is echoed by Wheeler and the Smith party finally reaching California, only to be turned back by its Mexican rulers.

In Episode 2, written by Cyrus Nowrasteh and directed by Simon Wincer, Jacob, his brother Jethro (Skeet Ulrich) and several Wheeler women join a wagon train of settlers. Because much of Episode 1 is devoted to basic story exposition introducing the two families, Episode 2 has more breathing space. There's a nod to The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh's 1930 epic that gave John Wayne his first starring role) in the sequence where wagons are lowered by pulley down a cliff, showing how arduous and dangerous it was for pioneers to cross the mountains.

In Episode 3, written by Craig Storper and directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, the pace quickens with the 1848 discovery of gold in California's American River. Jethro Wheeler's story comes to the fore, as he is swept up in gold fever, forcing a group of Chinese immigrant prospectors off their claim. On the plains, the situation of the Lakota and other tribes worsens, as Running Fox and Dog Star join a peace envoy led by Conquering Bear (Graham Greene) and other great chiefs, only to see the treaty they sign broken by a zealous, inept cavalry officer. And the next thread of the story is introduced with the characters of Kansas abolitionist Samson Wheeler (Matthew Modine) and his daughter Clara (Rachel Leigh Cook).

There are so many intricately overlapping plot lines in Into the West that discussing even half of them would spoil the viewers' pleasure of seeing this well-written story unfold. For the most part, the dialogue is solid and persuasive, particularly in the exchanges among the Lakota characters, delivered in a historically correct earlier version of their language and subtitled in English. Only one subplot teeters perilously on kitsch;
it involves the fate of Naomi Wheeler (Keri Russell), whose childbirth scene is shot with a decorum that's almost laughable.

Matthew Settle (a Western-sounding name if ever there was one) has the physical stature to take his heroic character Jacob from fresh-faced adventurer to kin of the Lakota, and then on to soldier and wilderness hermit. But it's Ulrich who has the meatier, if smaller, role. The talented actor, who for some time has been flirting with stardom, uses his character's arc to develop Jethro as a psychologically complex character, whose ideals and desires battle within him. The quality of their work is matched and in some scenes topped by their Native American costars: the magnetic McClarnon and Spears hold the screen as brothers at odds over how to deal with the increasing threat of the white world, and Carmelo, with her strong, anchoring presence, embodies the archetype of the Western woman as sustainer of culture and bridge between civilizations.

The power of the Native American storylines owes much to the knowledge and dedication of the impressively credentialed Native consultants that the producers enlisted. One particular standout is the prolific author John M. Marshall III (The Lakota Way), who not only served as advisor, but appears as the elder Loved by the Buffalo in episodes 5 and 6, and provides the voice of the series' Native narrator.

What historical anomalies exist can be chalked up to dramatic license and the need to compress a great deal of information in limited screen time. For instance, the sequence where the Lakota hunt buffalo by stampeding them over the cliff shows a historically accurate method of hunting, but one that had been largely supplanted early in the 19th century by individual hunters on horseback armed with rifles (see Guy Gibbon's landmark volume, The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations). Visually it's a much more exciting way to portray the hunt, but it also fits the emphasis of the narrative on the traditional culture and accomplishments of the Lakota, their pre-modern rituals, domestic habits and intratribal relationships.

This is a choice, not only a dramatic, but a political one as well, and no one can fault its underlying intention, which is to counter Hollywood's long, painful history of overwhelmingly racist depictions of Native Americans as marauding savages. The image of Indians circling covered wagons, so much a staple of Westerns, may have had foundation in fact, but the larger reality is that it was the relentlessly advancing Euro-Americans who effectively were circling the Natives, constricting them into tighter and tighter clusters and reducing their numbers, before finally consigning them all to reservations.

Into the West aims to supplant that image of a circle with one more positive: the Great Circle of Life, and everyone's rightful place in it.

Check local listings for Into the West, a TNT presentation in association with DreamWorks Television. Episode 1, Wheel to the Stars, airs selected dates, June 10 through July 4. Episode 2, Manifest Destiny, airs selected dates, June 17 through July 4. Episode 3, Dreams & Schemes, airs selected dates, June 24 through July 10.

June 15, 2005

- by Andrea Gronvall

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