Steven Spielberg’s Epic of the Old West

Plains Indians in Into the West

Into the West, produced by Steven Spielberg, broadcast on TNT earlier this year, and now available on DVD, is probably the most ambitious miniseries ever attempted, charting the trek of white immigrants from the earliest wagon trains through the California Gold Rush to the final bloody clash between whites and Indians at Wounded Knee. Its cast includes literally dozens of recognizable names and faces, including Simon R. Baker, Tom Berenger, Beau Bridges, Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Rachael Leigh Cook, Graham Greene, Lance Henrikson, Russell Means, Matthew Modine, Will Patton, Judge Reinhold, and Wes Studi. The presence of Greene, Means, and Studi guarantees a strong Native American presence in the series. It’s possible that no other Western has featured so many prominent actors of Indian ancestry.

The theme is conflict—constant, unrelenting conflict. Conflict between East and West, between civilization and the frontier, between man and nature, and between white and Indian culture. Conflict is also a part of the series itself: The scripts are invariably conflicted by the desire to tell the story with some kind of factual basis but without offending anyone. Much care has been taken in guaranteeing the authenticity of the speech, dress, and customs of different Western tribes, but every time there’s a clash between white and red peoples the story makes a beeline for the middle-of-the-road position. For instance the ongoing debate as to who invented scalping, whites or Indians, is resolved when the first scalping (of a white frontiersman) is done by a member of neither race but by a grizzly bear. (Perhaps Steven Colbert is right to include bears in his weekly “Threatdown.”)

That being said, the pleasures of Into the West are undeniable. Not the least of them is the one of, once you’ve adjusted to the series’ relaxed rhythm, settling down with a genuine and in many ways old-fashioned Western—though in many ways Into the West tries less to be a Western than about the Old West that Hollywood Westerns either ignored or bypassed.

It has become a truism in the movie and television business that the Western is dead. Like nearly all truisms espoused by people in the entertainment business, this is false. In fact, if one added up all the feature films, syndicated TV series, and made-for-television productions of the past 25 years, the Western would certainly prove to be more alive than the musical, the detective story, the horror story, or nearly any other traditional movie genre. It’s just that the Western, like nearly everything else these days, is now dominated by action and special effects, in an effort to attract the only regular demographic that can be counted on to buy movie tickets, adolescent males. (Was the horrendous Wild, Wild West a Western, sci-fi, or an action movie? What was the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson comedy, Shanghai Noon, an Eastern Western?) By rights a program as impressive as Into the West should be reaching a mass audience, or at least have a crack at reaching it. Instead it must settle for that portion of the audience that watches miniseries on cable. Fortunately TNT knows better than anyone else how to reach those viewers, and how to market the DVD to those who missed it but are still interested.

The narrative, which covers the seven crucial decades in the white settlement of the frontier from 1823 to 1892, was created by one author, William Mastrosimone, but the various episodes have different directors, including Timothy Van Patten, who has also directed The Sopranos, and Simon Wincer, who directed the greatest of all Western miniseries and perhaps the best Western of any kind in the last 30 years, Lonesome Dove. The result is that each episode has a signature intelligence behind it and a compactness that is dramatically satisfying. You don’t feel as if you need to watch all the episodes in chronological order to enjoy one of them. The drawback is that overall the series lacks the kind of dramatic flow that comes from a single vision. Characters appear and reappear over the years with a Dickensian frequency but without any of the impact of Dickens’s narrative strength.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll feel cheated in any way by the DVD set. Rather the opposite, if you watch it with a little patience over a period of time, instead of rushing through each episode. You can push that pause button whenever you like and soak up the gorgeousness of several still-pristine Western vistas, though you may not want to know that most of the outdoor scenes were shot in Canada. Too few U.S. locales could be found that weren’t broken by telephone poles or billboards.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.