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’s grass in Montana that nobody has claimed, and can’t stop thinking about it. The 10 is for a work that justifies its length in every direction. The drive takes months, the miniseries takes six and a half hours, and the proportion is the point. People die of things that aren’t dramatic, the weather is a character, and the destination turns out not to matter. There’s nothing in it I’d 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’s built entirely out of an argument they’ve 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, can’t acknowledge his own son, and the entire performance is a man declining to say things the audience can see him thinking.
Duvall’s Gus is the man I’d most want to share a porch with in any Western. He’s funny, he’s wise, and he knows exactly how foolish the whole venture is. Jones gets less credit and I think he deserves more, because in every scene with Newt I’m watching his face for something that never comes.
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.
Let the perceptive character name the cost. Gus states the risk plainly and goes anyway, so the audience can’t 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. That’s a boy killed by water moccasins in a river crossing. It arrives with no build, no music and no warning, and it’s horrifying because the show has spent two hours letting the audience know him.
That river crossing wrecks me. There’s no music and no warning, and a boy is gone in a moment the show refuses to dress up. I think it’s the bravest thing in all six and a half hours.
A film wouldn’t have that. Ninety minutes of runtime means every death must be structurally significant, and the deaths here are mostly accidents, illness and bad luck. That’s 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. That’s 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. That’s why he works.
He takes Lorena from the camp and what follows is the darkest stretch in any Western on this page. The show doesn’t dramatize the assaults and doesn’t pretend they didn’t 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 isn’t. He gets her back, and she doesn’t 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. That’s the only thing he’s 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. That’s the harder and more respectful choice. A rescue that doesn’t repair the damage 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. That’s the other thing the length buys.
Danny Glover’s Deets is the best tracker in the outfit and the show treats him exactly as the other men treat him. That’s 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t want him, losing everybody in his care through no malice at all, and ending the story with nothing. He’s 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.
July’s thread is the one I find hardest to watch, and I wouldn’t cut a minute of it. He’s a decent man in over his head, chasing the wrong fugitive while Blue Duck and plain bad luck take nearly everything he has. Nothing he does makes it better, and that’s what makes it so painful to me.
Clara, played by Anjelica Huston, is the one who gets to say the true thing about Call. She tells him plainly what he’s done to his son and to Gus, and she’s the only character in the story he can’t answer.
She’s 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. That’s 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 won’t 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. Gus’s long dying is the part of Lonesome Dove I’d put against anything in the genre. Duvall talks the entire time, joking and arranging, and I find it harder to sit through than any gunfight because he stays so completely himself right to the end.
The last line belongs to a bartender who asks whether it’s true that Call is a man of vision. He answers that he’s a man of vision all right, quite a vision, and rides off. That’s 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’s spent the entire story refusing sentiment. The gesture means something because it’s out of character, and it’s 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. That 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’s been explaining everything is the loudest thing in the last hour.
Should you watch Lonesome Dove?
Yes, all six and a half hours, and I’d call it the best Western ever made for any screen. The 10 comes from how much it trusts me with: a boy dead in a river with no music, a rescue that fixes nothing, a sheriff who loses everything, and a promise about a body and an orchard that Call keeps for no reason except that he said he would. I wouldn’t trade a single slow hour of it for a tighter cut.
