Taylor Sheridan’s Cowslaughter – Weekend – Kommersant
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Paramount+ has released all episodes of 1923, the second of the acclaimed Yellowstone prequels, as showrunner Taylor Sheridan expands her multi-generational Dutton western saga to epic proportions. In the new part, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren are fighting for their American dream in the form of an exemplary ranch.
In the opening scene of Taylor Sheridan’s new western, stern Kara Dutton (Helen Mirren) points her gun at a man in a cowboy hat lying on the ground, who begs for mercy, one hand fumbles for a dropped gun, convulsively loads while her gun misfires … but she manages to fire first. “Violence has always followed our family. It followed us from the Scottish mountains and from the slums of Dublin. And where he was not, we ourselves were looking for him, ”says a female voice behind the scenes, which belongs to another heroine from the Duttons, Elsa (her story is told in the previous part of the Dutton saga – the 1883 series).
At a glance, you might think that we are facing another revisionist feminist western like the recent “Englishwoman” or “Godforgotten” – but it never happened. Nugget Taylor Sheridan, who began his career as a screenwriter at the age of 40, makes exclusively conservative, condo, peasant westerns, insisted on the traditions of the old school, with the exception of the attitude towards the Indians – in Sheridan they are always positive heroes. This doesn’t need to be explained to Yellowstone fans (1923 and 1883 are its prequels). “Sheridan’s shows are thriving today because not only popular culture but also politics have armed themselves with nostalgia. Some Yellowstone fans just love Kevin Costner in a cowboy hat. Others are sick of the persuasion that they must change over time. They are suspicious of the soul-searching – and try to tell them that they are wrong, ”writes IndieWire columnist about Sheridan. He’s damn right about the entire Sheridan television universe, including the old-fashioned prison drama The Mayor of Kingstown and the King of Tulsa series, whose hero was on the bunk for a quarter of a century, and when he came out, he began to sag modernity under the old days. “Turns are not for my horse,” any of them could say.
In Yellowstone, Kevin Costner, as a modern-day Montana farmer, clings to his land and won’t give it up to anyone. In the prequel 1883, his great-grandfather James Dutton (Tim McGraw) believes only in his family and rides with a convoy of settlers towards the frontier to put down roots where life is simple and there are no saloons and brothels. In 1923, his older brother Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford) is shoulder-deep into his ranch. But in 1923, with the farms already crippled by the economic depression, his routine is cracking at the seams as drought hits the fields—livestock cannot be fed in scorched grass fields, and the local Scots bully Creighton (Jerome Flynn) tends his sheep. in foreign lands. Having caught and nearly hanged Creighton on a tree and taken away his herd, Jacob makes himself a mortal enemy. “One day you will become a rancher,” he instructs his young nephew, “and you must understand who your main enemy is. Not wolves, not droughts and blizzards, and not Texas fever. These are other people. A person would rather take someone else’s property than acquire it himself – all the empires of this world are built on the ruins of conquests. It was the Creighton Gang invader that was shot by Kara in the first scene. But the dodgy Creighton found himself a powerful new ally.
That ally is Whitfield (Timothy Dalton), a resourceful businessman who profits from the misfortunes of others. He is one of those capitalists who say about themselves: “I am a businessman, and the word “decency” does not apply to me.” Whitfield wants to take over Dutton’s land so he can use it for mining. With a mocking grin, he convinces Dutton that cattle breeding is an obsolete trade, people are now more willing to settle in cities with comfort and convenience, and the time of hardened farmers is gone. “You’re outdated,” this tempting snake whispers to Dutton, and Dutton can only twist his mouth and grit his teeth in impotence. But Dutton does not want to change, and try to object to him. Sheridan’s shows are always more than just the stories of men in cowboy hats, be it Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Sam Elliott or Tom Hanks (he didn’t disdain to star in 1883 in a five-minute episode as General Meade), it’s an ideology conservatism that sprouted in pop culture.
Only the frontier is constantly shifting towards the horizon, and change is fraught with violence – and Sheridan’s new series is simply imbued with it. The same Whitfield is not interested in sex – instead, he makes corrupt girls beat each other with a whip and savor someone else’s pain with pleasure. Dutton’s nephew, who went through the First World War, shoots lions in Africa that attack tourists. And what the nuns are doing in a boarding school for Indian girls is generally hard to imagine. The show’s most suffering heroine, Indian girl Theonna (Amina Nieves), is beaten by sadistic sister Mary (Jennifer Ehle) until she escapes the white man’s blessing back to the prairie.
“When Elsa’s voice says off-screen, ‘Violence has always followed this family,’ that’s a big understatement. According to Sheridan, violence is the DNA of the American dream, the legacy of our identity – we are able to inflict it on the land, the people who used to own it (here we mean the Indians), and spread it to the whole world around us, ”writes the columnist from The Hollywood Reporter. And try to tell them they’re wrong.
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