Zap2it.com a écrit :HBO Goes in Search of 'Deadwood'
By Kate O'Hare
In the early decades of the 20th century, the last of the people who saw the Wild West with their own eyes died. Some survived to see the birth of the movies, in which the West would find new life, although the celluloid version would likely have been an unfamiliar place to the cowpokes, prospectors, settlers and displaced American Indians who lived (or didn't) through the experience.
The romance of chasing the sunset into a new life, that endless promise of the second chance, superseded the brutal reality of stretching the nation from coast to coast.
It was not the God-given right of manifest destiny that propelled the move West as much as greed, desperation and fear, propped up by a small measure of hope. That hope is hard to find in the world of the HBO series "Deadwood," premiering Sunday, March 21 -- swamped as it is in a sea of muck, blood, horse manure and profanity -- but it shines nonetheless.
"The epigraph for our show," says David Milch ("NYPD Blue"), creator and executive producer, "is this: Let us remember too how glory may flare of a sudden up from the filth of the world's floor. It's such a beautiful story. I love our country so much, in all of its shortcomings. We have the capacity for such terrible tragedy and for real transcendence or deep goodness."
"I remember once, I hit a low spot and didn't really see any point in going on, and this guy, who I have a lot of respect for, said to me, 'It's only when I am trapped in Hell that I can find my way to Heaven's gate.' What I wanted to re-enact in this series was a form of original sin."
Blending real and fictional characters and events, the 12-episode "Deadwood" is set in 1876 in the town of the same name, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Deeded to the Sioux Nation only eight years before, the land became home to the richest gold strike in American history. Fortune-seekers formed an outlaw settlement, outside the boundaries of the United States, founded in blood and united by greed.
The series opens in July, just two weeks after Custer's army fell to the Sioux in the Battle of Little Big Horn. Firmly in the grip of saloonkeeper and criminal entrepreneur Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), Deadwood is changed forever by the arrival of two sets of newcomers.
Making a low-key entrance is the mercantile duo of former marshal Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Jewish merchant Sol Star (John Hawkes). They aim to set up a hardware store and avoid trouble (they succeed in one and completely fail in the other).
Creating more of a stir are legendary gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and his companions, Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) and the equally legendary Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), whose capacity for foul language is exceeded only by her thirst for liquor. The chance meeting of Hickok and Bullock sets off a chain of events that eventually brings law, if not order, to Deadwood, but not before chaos and suffering on a biblical scale.
"The idea, rather than revise history," Carradine says, "is trying to get it right. There are so many myths and so many fantasies about the West. It's been romanticized and fantasized. It's the idea of presenting this information, most of which will be new for the general public, because they're so steeped in inaccuracies and myths, repeated over and over again by Hollywood. We're going to show you how it actually was."
Milch thinks this frontier tale still has much to say in a world where new frontiers are hard to find.
"As we live into the sense of limitation, then what do we do?" he says. "Do we turn in upon ourselves? As long as there's a beckoning West, you can justify anything. You can always start over. But now you first live into your sense of finitude and limitation.
"That's why this is not a Western. This is not a story about cowboys. This is a story about an abstract -- gold. It is the opposite of the frontier spirit. Gold is an illusion agreed upon. It's like history.
"It has no intrinsic value, only that which people agree collectively to ascribe to it. This is an organizing social principle. That's what I wanted to show. Out of that abstraction is the genesis of society. Deadwood, because it was literally outside America, the only thing that was organizing the behavior was the enmity toward the other and an agreed-upon illusion."
Speaking of illusion, the sets of "Deadwood" are constructed at Gene Autry's Melody Ranch, a bit of Old West moviemaking now surrounded by an expensive, gated housing development in Newhall, Calif., about a half-hour north of Los Angeles. Punch in your code at the gate, pass the palatial houses, turn right and then left, and you're in a ramshackle town with a rutted quagmire for a main street.
"That thoroughfare was famous," Milch says. "The stench was so unbearable. It was so deep, there's a story that a guy actually drowned in the muck. That's a helluva way to go."
Perhaps the only thing dirtier than Deadwood itself is the language, which is salty even for HBO. This is no mere indulgence, Milch says, but a way to establish the pecking order in a world without rules.
"True obscenity," Milch says, "those words are always excluded. That's why there's been such continuity for five centuries in those words, because they're never co-opted by the so-called mainstream culture. It seemed to me self-evident that therefore the people of that world would use those words.
"It's also a way of not committing violence. If you are constantly announcing what you're willing to do, sometimes that saves you from having to do it."
)
rker au générique vaut à seule le détour, mais l'équipe réalisation n'est pas mal non plus : Davis Guggenheim (régulier d'"Alias" et "24") et surtout Walter Hill, habitué des westerns (Wild Bill, Geronimo, Le Gang des frères James) dont le film le plus connu est "48 heures" et le plus culte "Driver".
dans le rôle de Doc Cochran.
