my Movie

Movie Details

Title:   Deadwood: The Movie
Director:   Daniel Minahan
Year:   2019
Genre:   Western
Times Seen:   1
Last Seen:   07.28.19

Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- Series 7

Notes History
Date Viewed Venue Note
07.28.19Internet Over the past several months I re-watched The Sopranos. It was good, with the later seasons being better than I remembered. After that, I thought it would be nice to do something similar with Deadwood since the movie was coming out. Where I found Sopranos benefited from binge-y viewings of 2-3 episodes at a time, I found each episode of Deadwood so great and full of rich content that I limited myself to one episode at a time just to savor it. It's so... so... good. And the third season, which I remember watching week to week and thinking it was straining under the weight of its cast and ever-expanding scope, I found this time to be suitably concise and just as good as the others. Most notably, I remember not thinking much of the theater troop's addition to camp but Brian Cox's character is so great... he's just a joy to watch interact with the rest of the town.

The one faltered note in the series is how the third season ends. There's a over-quick reveal of Hearst's travel plans and a rushed deception that moral anchors Bullock and Utter seem to have no problem with. Maybe my favorite thing about this movie is its attention to resolve the weaknesses of that finale and supply a much more fitting goodbye to the show and its characters.

In that, I think the movie does quite well. I confess that I watched the finale and the movie on the same night since I was excited to finally consume new material all these years later (and after a pretty lengthy process of only watching 3-4 episodes a week leading up to this), but all of the cast and the town itself presented themselves as the same people and place that I loved being around since the beginning of season 1. Sure it's 10 years later, people have grown older, and the town looks more civilized with some actual brick construction, but it still felt absolutely the same.

And I guess that's why this movie finally exists: to step foot in the muddy thoroughfare once more and spare a few hours for a final and proper goodbye to this extraordinarily well-written show brought to life by a large and uniformly excellent cast. I didn't need or want any new revelations or some twist on the formula... It's a victory in that this felt like another episode and didn't disappoint. And I was very glad to spot Garret Dillahunt in there as well.