Lonesome Dove (1989) Review
10/10
Two retired Texas Rangers run a livery company in a dead border town. One of them is content. The other has been told there is grass in Montana that nobody has claimed, and cannot stop thinking about it.
The 10 is for a work that earns its length in every direction. The drive takes months, the miniseries takes six and a half hours, and the proportion is the whole point. People die of things that are not dramatic, the weather is a character, and the destination turns out not to matter.
There is nothing in it I would cut. Four episodes, an enormous cast, and every death lands because the show had the room to make each of those people specific first.
Gus and Call
Robert Duvall plays Augustus McCrae as a man who talks constantly, drinks before noon, and is the most perceptive person in any room he enters. Tommy Lee Jones plays Woodrow Call as somebody who has never said a true thing about himself out loud.
The friendship is the spine and it is built entirely out of an argument they have been having for thirty years. Gus thinks Call has wasted his life on work. Call thinks Gus has wasted his on talk. Neither will concede and neither will leave.
Duvall said it was the best part he ever had and the performance supports it. Gus is funny for six hours and is also the only character who understands what the drive is going to cost, which he says out loud repeatedly while going anyway.
Jones does the harder half. Call is withholding to the point of cruelty, cannot acknowledge his own son, and the entire performance is a man declining to say things the audience can see him thinking.
A friendship built on a long-running disagreement generates scenes indefinitely. The argument never resolves, both men are partly right, and every new situation is another round of it. The rule is that neither can win. A disagreement one party can settle is a plot point instead of a relationship.
Pair a talker with a withholder and you have dialogue in every scene without contrivance. One of them will always be saying what the other refuses to.
Give the perceptive one the job of naming the cost. Gus states the risk plainly and goes anyway, which means the audience cannot dismiss the venture as ignorance.
The Length Is the Argument
A cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana takes months, and the show is willing to spend hours on the ordinary business of it.
That patience produces the single most famous death in the story, which is a boy killed by water moccasins in a river crossing. It arrives with no build, no music and no warning, and it is horrifying precisely because the show has spent two hours letting the audience know him.
A film would not have that. Ninety minutes of runtime means every death must be structurally significant, and the deaths here are mostly accidents, illness and bad luck, which is what the historical record really contains.
The drive also has stretches where nothing happens except distance, and the show keeps them. Somebody sings, somebody complains about the food, the herd moves, and the audience accumulates the months alongside the characters.
McMurtry wrote the novel after a screenplay of the same material failed to get made in the 1970s, and won a Pulitzer for it. The book runs past eight hundred pages and the drive occupies most of them, which is the shape the miniseries preserved and a film would have had to destroy.
Blue Duck and the Kidnapping
Frederic Forrest plays a Comanchero as the most frightening figure in the story, and the show uses him sparingly, which is why he works.
He takes Lorena from the camp and what follows is the darkest stretch in any Western on this page. The show does not dramatize the assaults and does not pretend they did not happen, and Diane Lane plays the aftermath across the remaining episodes instead of in a single scene.
Gus’s rescue is the sequence that could have been triumphant and is not. He gets her back, and she does not recover, and the show follows what that means for both of them for hours afterward.
Blue Duck’s last scene is the correct ending for him. Facing a hanging, he throws himself out of a courthouse window taking a deputy with him, and tells Call that no white man is going to hang him, which is the only thing he has left to decide.
Violence against a character should be followed instead of depicted. The show declines to stage the assaults and spends hours on what they did, which is the harder and more respectful choice. A rescue that does not repair the damage is what separates a story about a person from a story about an incident.
Use your most frightening antagonist sparingly. Blue Duck appears in perhaps six scenes across six hours and dominates all of them because the show refuses to make him familiar.
Let a villain have one dignity. The window is a decision, and giving an irredeemable character a single choice they get to make is what stops them being a device.
Everybody Gets a Life
The supporting cast is enormous and the show finds time for every one of them, which is the other thing the length buys.
Danny Glover’s Deets is the best tracker in the outfit and is treated by the show exactly as the other men treat him, which is with total professional respect and a social distance nobody names. His death is the one that breaks Call. Ricky Schroder’s Newt is the emotional center, a boy who does not know who his father is while everybody around him does, and the show makes the audience wait the full six hours for an acknowledgment that never properly arrives.
July Johnson is the saddest thread. A decent, useless sheriff pursuing a woman who does not want him, losing everybody in his care through no malice at all, and ending the story with nothing. He is the counterargument to every Western about a man who rides after something, since he rides after something and it destroys him and nobody learns anything.
Clara, played by Anjelica Huston, is the one who gets to say the true thing about Call. She tells him plainly what he has done to his son and to Gus, and she is the only character in the story he cannot answer.
She is also the woman Gus spent thirty years talking about and never married, and the show gives them one afternoon together late on. Two people in their fifties who both chose otherwise, being polite about it, which is the most adult scene in the whole production.
The Body Goes Back to Texas
Gus dies of an infection from an arrow wound, having refused the amputation that would have saved him, because he will not live without legs.
The death takes a full episode and is the best material in the whole production. He talks for hours, arranges everything, and extracts a promise that Call will carry his body back to Texas to be buried in an orchard where he once had a picnic.
The promise is absurd and both men know it. Thousands of miles, alone, with a corpse, for a sentiment Gus admits is ridiculous, and Call does it because he said he would.
That final journey is the show’s whole argument about these two men. Gus spent his life talking about what matters and Call spent his refusing to, and the last thing Call does is spend a year proving Gus was right without ever saying so.
The last line belongs to a bartender who asks whether it is true that Call is a man of vision. He answers that he is a man of vision all right, a hell of a vision, and rides off, which is as close to self-knowledge as the character ever gets and it arrives in the form of a complaint.
An ending that requires an enormous effort for a sentimental reason works when the character performing it has spent the entire story refusing sentiment. The gesture means something because it is out of character, and it is out of character because the story spent six hours establishing the character.
Let the promise be acknowledged as absurd inside the story. Both men say so, which removes the reader’s objection before they can make it.
Kill your talker and leave the silent one to finish alone. The absence of the voice that has been explaining everything is the loudest thing in the last hour.
Should you watch Lonesome Dove?
Yes, all six and a half hours, and it is the best Western ever made for any screen. Two men who have been arguing for thirty years, a drive that costs more than it returns, and a promise about a body and an orchard that one of them keeps for no reason except that he said he would.
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