Sheridan, Taylor (1970- )

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    ‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ Review: A Frontier Injustice

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    David Oyelowo gives an unimpeachable performance, but Taylor Sheridan still hasn’t met a western that he can’t turn into an overheated melodrama.What we know, or have decided to accept, about the life of the deputy U.S. marshal Bass Reeves has more of the flavor of carnival legend than of scholarship. The Paramount+ series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” which concluded on Sunday, was based not on history books or biographies but on novels. The most prominent telling of his story so far was a dramatization of a dramatization.That kind of haziness leaves room for invention, and the tales that have settled around Reeves — a former slave credited with 3,000 arrests; a crack shot said to have killed 14 men in the line of duty — could be the basis for a new take on classic western action and adventure. The tales also suggest that the career Reeves carved out for himself, and the extreme success he found, would at least occasionally have caused him some excitement and joy. That is not where “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” ended up.David Oyelowo gave an unimpeachable performance as Reeves, focused and intense and emotionally true. And the show’s creator, Chad Feehan, and his directors, Christina Alexandra Voros and Damian Marcano, put onscreen a notably handsome and visually credible evocation of the American West in the 1870s. The show had texture — it gave a tactile pleasure throughout its eight episodes.But as it went along, it became less of a treat to watch and more of a chore. Its story of heroism against all odds had gun battles and frontier romance, but we were almost never allowed to simply enjoy them. And poor David Oyelowo appeared to be having less fun than anyone.It was to the show’s credit that it didn’t try to make Reeves a six-gun superman — he operated with guile and caution, letting other people’s carelessness and hotheadedness work for him, and he grimaced and cowered when under fire. But the show’s one-note insistence on his beleaguered nobility, even as his composure faded and his trigger finger got too itchy, was so continual and unmodulated that it flattened the character and drained the story of humor.Reeves’s arc in the early episodes, as he emerged from slavery, tried his hand at farming and then was recruited into the marshals’ service by a sympathetic judge (played by Donald Sutherland), had an urgent, realistic snap to it. But once he put on the badge, the show slowed and got down to its real business, which wasn’t dramatizing the exploits of an exceptional lawman under grueling circumstances.Lauren E. Banks as Jennie Reeves and Demi Singleton as her daughter Sally. The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes.Emerson Miller/Paramount+The latter half of the season was, instead, about putting Reeves through a crisis of conscience over his enforcement of laws enacted and administered by the same white men who had once enslaved him. (The more interesting choice dramatically, and probably the one better supported by the historical record, would have been for him not to care.) And having established its seriousness, the show went big, inventing as its embodiment of racist evil an ex-Confederate Texas Ranger (played by Barry Pepper) who used Black prisoners as slave labor and, just to drive home his odiousness, quoted French Enlightenment drama.That “Lawmen” would undergo a mytho-melodramatic implosion is perhaps not surprising. It is in the purview of the executive producer Taylor Sheridan, who has shown a bent for gaseous mythologizing in westerns like “Yellowstone” and “1883.” And Feehan has a history with shows that privileged macho poetics over straightforward action, like “Ray Donovan,” “Banshee” and “Rectify.”The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes, which ran in counterpoint to the alternately depressive and histrionic story of Reeves’s work. Reeves’s wife, Jennie, and his oldest daughter, Sally, who kept the farm running in his absence, were played with warmth and great feeling by Lauren E. Banks and Demi Singleton; as impressive as Oyelowo was, it was always a relief when the action shifted to the farm.And racism and racial oppression in the post-Reconstruction era were treated more cogently and dramatically in those scenes as well. The awakening of the pragmatic Jennie to the larger issues championed by her sister Esme (Joaquina Kalukango) was subtle and touching; by contrast, the closing scene of Reeves leading a column of Black prisoners to freedom bordered on camp.Sheridan’s track record as a producer has ticked up lately, with “Tulsa King” and “Special Ops: Lioness” and even the early episodes of “Lawmen.” But when he makes westerns, modern or historical, he always seems to be caught between two conflicting impulses. One is to make anti-westerns like those of the 1960s and ’70s, in which the clichés of the genre are exposed and debunked; the other is to make deluxe versions of the classically sentimental western, in which those same clichés are renewed and celebrated. There’s another choice, of course, which would be just to make a good western. More

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      ‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Review: Zoe Saldana Does Strong and Silent

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      The actress stars in a new series from Taylor Sheridan, known for his prototypically male heroes. This time, the dispensers of justice and violence are women.The “politics” of the writer and producer Taylor Sheridan’s television catalog — “Yellowstone,” “1883,” “Mayor of Kingstown,” “1923” and “Tulsa King” — are the subject of exhaustive discussion that isn’t always that pertinent to the series themselves. For something of more immediate artistic interest, how about the shows’ fascination with the violent deaths of women?The number of men who die in Sheridan’s westerns, neo-westerns, Midwestern noirs and — with the Sunday premiere of “Special Ops: Lioness” on Paramount+ — terrorism dramas is much greater, but they tend to die in the usual anonymous, bullet-spraying manner. Women’s deaths are more baroque, and more elaborately presented. A tourist has her throat ripped out by a leopard and is dropped from a tree like an overripe piece of fruit; a nun is suffocated in her bed, her mouth stuffed with tissue and her face branded (both “1923”). A stoolie girlfriend is brutally strangled (“Tulsa King”). The entire season of “1883” is in effect a flashback framed by the gruesome death of its heroine, run through by an arrow.This emphasis on female death doesn’t feel particularly lurid or sexualized; its importance is as a motif. It’s in the fabric of the shows, where dead mothers are as much of an accessory for the characters as cowboy hats and the woman at the center of “1883” narrates “1923” from beyond the grave. Its function is to reinforce a central theme of Sheridan’s oeuvre: the classic onus of male duty, an essential part of which is the protection of women, even though Sheridan, who likes to hedge his cultural bets, presents the women as fierce and capable in their own right.And it’s a primary reason for the shows’ distinctiveness. Overheated melodrama and sentimentality and a canny, plausibly deniable appeal to conservative and libertarian values are the obvious parts of the package, but they get their particular flavor from an oddly literary, morbidly romantic strain of neo-Victorian kitsch.(The literary and other allegiances in Sheridan’s writing — to Hemingway and John Ford in the westerns, to Greek tragedy in “Mayor of Kingstown” — are inescapable. The most enjoyable of his shows is the least pretentious one, and the only dramedy: the Sylvester Stallone vehicle “Tulsa King,” which benefits from the involvement of the “Sopranos” veteran Terence Winter as Sheridan’s showrunner.)“Special Ops: Lioness” differs from Sheridan’s other shows in several significant ways. It is a battlefield show, set among C.I.A. agents and Marines carrying out counterterrorism operations in the Middle East. And it is entirely focused on women: Its major action figures are a C.I.A. operative played by Zoe Saldana; a Marine, recruited for an undercover assignment, played by Laysla De Oliveira; and a gung-ho Marine team leader played by Jill Wagner.Paramount+ provided only one episode for review, so judgments at this point are tentative if not superfluous. But the Sheridanness of the show is evident. It is noticeable, for instance, that the three central women embodying the values of endurance and violent capability that Sheridan fetishizes go by the unisex names of Joe, Cruz and Bobby.More noticeable is the show’s premise, at least as it appears in the first episode, written by Sheridan and directed by John Hillcoat. The women, while presented as fully qualified for combat (in some cases in punishing detail), are not tasked with taking on terrorists directly. Their mission is to gain access by befriending women in the terrorists’ lives — to run a modified honey trap. You can see how this will provide plenty of opportunities for them to engage in brutal action, and perhaps the whole thing is a satirical starting point that eventually will be knocked down. But in the first episode the retrograde setup is presented entirely at face value.(The operation Saldana’s character runs takes its name from Team Lioness, a more utilitarian real-life program in which female soldiers were added to combat teams in part because of religious prohibitions against the touching or searching of women by men.)What can be said about “Special Ops” from its first 42 minutes is that it looks like an awful lot of other counterterrorism thrillers, with a visceral punch to its action and a ticky-tacky, backlot feel whenever it moves in close on its Middle Eastern settings. Saldana registers stoic magnetism, as usual, as the overseer of the operation, who shuttles between the field and meetings in Washington with her bosses, one of whom is played by Nicole Kidman. (Morgan Freeman will show up later as the secretary of state.) Other performers have trouble adding much to their characters’ stock, neo-“Dirty Dozen” personas. One of the few things we learn about De Oliveira’s Cruz: Her mother died.There is one moment in the “Special Ops” premiere — just a fleeting reaction shot — that taps directly into the mythos Sheridan’s shows share. When a mission goes bad, Saldana’s Joe calls in a missile strike that kills her own undercover operative. Debriefed later, she explains that she did it for “the sanctity of our operation.” But having seen the look on Joe’s face as she listened to the woman screaming while being set upon by a group of angry Arab men, we know that she had a different sanctity in mind. Sometimes, the first imperative when it comes to women’s safety is preventing the fate worse than death. More

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      Wes Bentley Was at Rock Bottom. Now He Is on ‘Yellowstone.’

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      Years of addiction and struggle followed his breakout role in “American Beauty.” He lived to tell the tale, and get a major role on TV’s biggest show.It’s not easy being Jamie Dutton.The adopted son of the ruthless rancher John Dutton on Paramount Network’s wildly popular neo-western series “Yellowstone,” Jamie just wanted to be a cowboy. Instead the man who raised him sent him off to law school. He wanted to be governor of Montana, but John stepped over him in humiliating fashion. His sister, Beth, eviscerates him on a regular basis. He has spent four-and-a-half seasons desperate for the paterfamilias’ attention while also hating his guts.Nor is it easy playing Jamie Dutton. Wes Bentley can tell you all about that. Jamie has taken him to some dark places, the kinds of places he knows all too well.“He’s incredibly sad,” the actor said over brunch recently at an outdoor cafe in Los Angeles. “I’ve always dealt with my sadness with things like comedy, or humor, or drugs at one point, or trying to just ignore it and finding another way out of it. But you can’t do that when you’re trying to portray someone’s sadness. You have to let it be there. That’s been the hardest part of it all, and it’s weighed on my life a little bit.”Bentley, 44, makes it clear that he’s not complaining. He’s grateful to be a key part of the most popular drama on television, which had its midseason finale on Sunday amid a fresh batch of potential familial murder plots. More than that, he’s grateful to be alive.And yet, “The regrets are always going to be there,” he added.Most people are likely to have first encountered Bentley as Ricky Fitts, Kevin Spacey’s pot-dealing neighbor in the 1999 film “American Beauty.” He was 21 when the movie debuted, and he seemed like a handsome, soulful young man with a future. But he grew disillusioned with the roles that came his way next — “It was all vampires and underdeveloped young people,” he said — and found himself drifting into addiction. Heroin. Cocaine. Lots of booze. In 2008, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to heroin possession and trying to pass a counterfeit $100 bill. He was falling toward his bottom fast.Bentley (with Thora Birch) found his breakout role early, as the sensitive pot dealer Ricky in the Oscar-winning 1999 film “American Beauty.” Lorey Sebastian/DreamworksHe remembers taking a job on a cheapie Stephen King adaptation, “Dolan’s Cadillac” (2009), and mapping out his next steps: “This is probably my last acting job,” he told himself. “I’m going to be a drug dealer and a D.J.”Around this time he fell in love with the woman who later became his wife, the associate producer and assistant director Jacqui Swedberg. This didn’t get him sober; it rarely works that way. But it made him want to be better and made him realize that he had no control over his life, and that he might just have something to live for.“Before I was like, I’m partying, fine, but I can stop this,” he said. “Now it was like, ‘Man, I can’t stop this, and I really want to.’” A friend in the industry started taking Bentley to 12-step meetings. He liked what he heard. And he saw that a different kind of life was possible.Bentley has been sober since July 5, 2009. Today, with a beard and eyeglasses that accentuate his sharp features, he seems present, forthright and easygoing. He blows off steam playing soccer in a league and hiking. “I have a constant stream of energy,” he said. “That’s what led to my addiction. I needed something to react to that energy.”But Jamie is never far away. It’s the role that really put him on the map, after supporting parts in post-crisis movies like “The Hunger Games” and “Interstellar.” It’s the gig of his life.And sometimes, it hurts like hell.Jamie’s most frequent “Yellowstone” combatant is his sister, Beth, played by the English actress Kelly Reilly. There’s a brute force to their scenes together, emotionally and, in the midseason finale, physically. (Beth knows how to handle herself.) When they were teens, Jamie took Beth to get an abortion, without telling her she was also getting a hysterectomy. She never forgave him. Jamie blames Beth for their mother’s death (as does Beth). She takes every opportunity to emasculate Jamie.Much of the pain Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), left, feels as a member of the Dutton clan on “Yellowstone” is inflicted by his sister, Beth (Kelly Reilly).Paramount NetworkAs Reilly said in a recent phone interview, “There’s something about his weakness that appalls her.”It can be exhausting to watch, and to play.“Wes and I have been doing this now together for five years,” Reilly said. “We know each other quite well, and we take care of one another tremendously. We both have to be quite fearless in those scenes. They’re quite ugly sometimes.” When there’s a chance to laugh together between takes, they jump on it.“Then you try to go home without carrying it all into the rest of your day,” she said.But that’s not always easy, especially after living with a character for so long.“I’ve prided myself for most of my career on leaving it at the door, or like an athlete would say, leaving it on the field,” Bentley said. “But Jamie’s sadness permeates my life, even though I’m not sad. I’m very lucky to have a great family and be where I’m at in life, but he’s always there behind me, clawing at that, especially when I’m shooting.”He said his wife sometimes has to point out Jamie’s unwanted presence: “‘You’re letting him come home now,” she tells him. “‘Jamie’s coming home and we don’t want him here.’”This season, however, Jamie’s step has been a bit more lively. The Dutton family’s corporate foes unleashed a barracuda, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), to turn Jamie against his family’s interests. It wasn’t hard; Jamie’s resentment had become a volcano waiting to erupt. But ever since Sarah seduced Jamie, and whispered, Lady Macbeth-like, in his ear, Olivieri has noticed a change in the actor as well as the character. Bentley had become more assertive, she said, less likely to apologize for things that aren’t his fault.“I have watched Wes change as a man, even in the short period of time that we’ve worked together,” she said in a recent video call. “It’s really hard as an actor to not absorb the character that you’re playing. You just become that person. When you’re a really good actor, it’s like you almost can’t even help it. And Wes is a really good actor.”Jamie’s sadness has always lived side by side with his capacity for evil. Under duress from Beth, he killed his biological father and, before that, a reporter who got too close to the family’s criminal ways. In the most recent episode, he began to consider the logistics of eliminating John and Beth. Through these developments Bentley has conjured a tricky mix of despair and cold, Machiavellian calculation.“Is Jamie evil?” the “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan wrote in an email. “In a lesser actor’s hands the answer would be easy, but Wes has crafted a vulnerable, honest and emotional character who allows the audience to understand the motivation behind his actions — even if there is no questioning the act itself.”Bentley went through a difficult period of alcohol abuse and drugs in the years after “American Beauty.” He has been sober since 2009.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThe “Yellowstone” directors rave about Bentley’s commitment, sensitivity and ability to think on his feet. “It’s remarkable, his ability to make you mad at Jamie, make you hate him and have him break your heart at the same time,” Stephen Kay said in a phone interview. “He’s one of one, if you ask me.”Kay made the comparison to another famous fictional son and brother, this one from a different crime family.“That role is so hard, so deceptively tricky,” Kay said. “We’ve been comparing it since Season 1 to Fredo in ‘The Godfather.’ John Cazale is arguably one of the best actors of all time, so if you’re building a show with a Fredo, you better hand the part to somebody who can play.”Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed the midseason finale, marveled at Bentley’s “courage to unravel himself.”“Everyone’s tortured on the show, but Jamie is in particular one of the more tortured characters,” she continued by phone. “He’s also interesting because you never really know if he’s a villain or a hero.”Bentley is more than happy to save his unraveling for the screen. He tried the other way, and he knows he was fortunate to survive.He lived to tell. Now he can take Jamie along for the ride.“I believe in fate, and I believe I went through all that, caused all that, and experienced all that, because I was going to get here,” he said. “There are many things that I regret, but I’m just so happy with my life.” More

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      Harrison Ford Loves His Craft. ‘1923’ Tested His Limits.

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      LOS ANGELES — In the course of 20 months and in the midst of a pandemic, Harrison Ford filmed a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” sequel in England. He shot a 10-part comedy, “Shrinking,” in Burbank. He herded cattle up a mountain in subzero Montana temperatures for “1923,” the latest prequel to the hit western series “Yellowstone.”He also celebrated his 80th birthday.“I’ve been working pretty much back-to-back, which is not what I normally do,” said Ford, unshaven, wearing bluejeans and boots and easing into a chair at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel here earlier this month. He was in Los Angeles for one night, for the premiere of “1923,” debuting Sunday on Paramount+. From here, it was on to Las Vegas the next morning for the next screening, yet another stop after a stretch of filming, travel and promotion that would exhaust an actor half his age.“I don’t how it happened,” Ford said, taking a sip from his cup of coffee. “But it happened.”It has been 45 years since Ford leaped off the screen as Han Solo in the first “Star Wars” movie, laying the foundation for a blockbuster career in which he has personified some of the most commercially successful movie franchises in film history. He has appeared in over 70 movies, with a combined worldwide box office gross of more than $9 billion. By now, it would seem, he has nothing left to prove.But at an age when many of his contemporaries have receded from public view, Ford is not slowing down, much less stepping away to spend more time at his ranch in Jackson, Wyo. He is still trying new things — “1923” represents his first major television part — still searching for one more role, still driven to stay before the camera.“I love it,” he said. “I love the challenge and the process of making a movie. I feel at home. It’s what I’ve spent my life doing.”And why should he slow down? Ford shows no sign of fading, physically or mentally — he was fleet and limber as he strode into the Luxe for our interview, cap pulled down, and later, as he worked the room at the post-premiere party at the Hollywood restaurant Mother Wolf. In his pace and eclectic choice of roles, including the weathered and weary rancher Jacob Dutton of “1923,” he seems as determined as ever to show that he can be more than just the swashbuckling action hero who gave the world Han Solo and Indiana Jones.“He can rest on his laurels: He doesn’t need to work financially,” said Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars” and who, at 71, does not miss the 5 a.m. wake-up calls and the hustling for the next role. “To be doing another ‘Indiana Jones’ — I’m in awe of him.”Ford is known for being gruff and nonresponsive, an actor not given to introspection and with little patience for “put me on the couch” questions. There were flashes of that during our 45 minutes together. “I know I walked myself into that dark alley where you’re now going to have to ask me to describe the character,” he said at one point. “And I don’t want to.”But for the most part Ford was forthcoming, relaxed and contemplative. This was a promotional tour, and after a half-century in the business, he knows how to do this. “I’m here to sell a movie,” Ford said, though, of course, he was there to sell a TV show — and to some extent, himself.“I don’t want to reinvent myself,” he said. “I just want to work.”Ford, center, as Jacob Dutton, an earlier patriarch of what will become the Dutton ranching empire of “Yellowstone.”Emerson Miller/Paramount+Jason Segel, left, with Ford in the Apple TV+ show “Shrinking,” of which Segel is a creator. Ford will play a psychiatrist, his second major TV role.Apple TV+FORD WAS ALWAYS more than just another charismatic Hollywood action star. He could act. There was the swagger and the smirk, but they were put to service in presenting complex heroes with flaws and self-doubt, including John Book, the detective in “Witness”; Jack Ryan, the C.I.A. analyst at the center of the Tom Clancy novels that inspired the films; and Rick Deckard, battling bioengineered humanoids in “Blade Runner.”That style distinguished him for much of his career from monosyllabic, musclebound action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme, and it has always been integral to his appeal: Hamill said he was struck by it the first time they acted together.“He was impossibly cool, world-weary, wary, somewhat snarky, flippant,” Hamill said.Television isn’t entirely new territory for Ford. When George Lucas cast him as a white-cowboy-hat-wearing drag racer in the 1973 film “American Graffiti,” Ford was 30, making a living as a part-time carpenter in Los Angeles. By then he had already been picking up modest roles in series like “Ironside,” “The Virginian” and “Gunsmoke” since the late 1960s.His role in “1923” is anything but modest: the great-great-great uncle of John Dutton III, the family patriarch portrayed by Kevin Costner in “Yellowstone,” TV’s most popular drama. As with “Yellowstone,” the scope of “1923” is vast — the Western vistas, the sweeping aerial shots, the complexity of the characters and their stories. It also features another major star, Helen Mirren, as his wife, Cara, the tough matriarch of the family.Ford watches little television — he said doesn’t have the time — and he knew little about “Yellowstone” when his agent first brought him the role. (In preparation, he watched some of “1883,” the first “Yellowstone” prequel, which follows an earlier generation of Duttons as they travel west by wagon train to establish the family ranch.) Based on an advance screener of the pilot, the cinematic ambitions of “1923” would be familiar to anyone who has watched “Game of Thrones” or “Breaking Bad.” But they have, these past four months, been a pleasant surprise for Ford.“They keeping calling it television,” Ford said, gesturing with a twist of his upper torso to a television screen in the next room. “But it’s so un-television. It is, you know, a huge vista. It’s an incredibly ambitious story that he’s telling in epic scale. The scale of the thing is enormous I think for the television.”Ford said he had agreed to the role after Taylor Sheridan, the lead creator behind the “Yellowstone” franchise, brought him to his ranch outside Fort Worth and sketched out the character. (“I’m 80, and I’m playing 77,” Ford said with a wry grin. “It’s a bit of a stretch.”) Ford was intrigued by Dutton, a stoic and somber rancher who must battle in the final years of his life to protect his land and family.“The character is not the usual character for me,” Ford said, likening it to his role playing a psychiatrist with Jason Segel in “Shrinking,” created by Segel and Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein (of “Ted Lasso”), debuting next month on Apple TV+. “I’ve never been to a psychiatrist in my life.”“I’m aware of the interest in the politics of the characters,” he said of the “Yellowstone” franchise. Of his own character, he added: “I’m not interested in the man’s politics.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesFilming “1923” tested his resilience and his love of the craft. Montana proved a brutal place to work; the cast and crew encountered blinding blizzards and stunningly cold temperatures during 10-hour days spent almost entirely outdoors.“It was a nightmare,” said Timothy Dalton, a former James Bond, who plays a rancher who challenges Ford for control of the land. “We are on top of a hill with a blasting wind coming at us. The cameras freeze up. Your toes freeze up.”Ben Richardson, who directed most of the “1923” episodes, described filming Ford as he rode horses up steep mountains, against knife-sharp winds, as Dutton herds cattle to higher altitudes and the promise of fields to graze.“I’ve never had a complaint from him,” Richardson said. “I can’t express how much of a team player he is — to the point that it’s shocking. He’s Harrison Ford. He could be doing anything. I’m sure there are people who would prefer to have a double standing in. He did not.” He added that he had “probably seen ‘Blade Runner’ 20 times,” studying how Ford presented himself onscreen.“There’s something truly compelling about watching him deal with difficult situations,” he said.From Ford’s earliest days as Han Solo, he has been wary of being typecast as a go-to action hero. He agreed to do the blockbusters urged on him by a Lucas or Steven Spielberg, but he also sought more than laser guns and bullwhips, gravitating to films like Peter Weir’s “Witness” (1985), and to directors like Alan J. Pakula (“Presumed Innocent,” “The Devil’s Own”).“I always went from a movie for me to a movie for them,” he said, referring to directors — and audiences — with a taste for action-hero blockbusters. “I don’t want to work for just one audience.”So it is that Ford will play a rancher in “1923” and a therapist in “Shrinking”— six months before his fifth “Indiana Jones” movie, “The Dial of Destiny,” opens in June.“He doesn’t get the credit for the diversity of his choices that he has chosen,” Hamill said. “Everybody loves ‘Indiana Jones,’ but we know what it is, and we’ve seen it before — he could do those for the rest of his life. The fact that he is doing something more challenging and more thought-provoking is something I admire about him.”Ford (right, with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill) leaped off the screen in his breakout role as Han Solo in the first “Star Wars” movie 45 years ago.20th Century FoxFord, left, with Sean Connery in the third movie of the “Indiana Jones” franchise, “The Last Crusade.” The fifth is scheduled for June 2023.Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionA CENTRAL PARADOX of Ford’s biography is that “Star Wars,” the franchise arguably most responsible for reshaping the industry in its image, made him one of the last true movie stars, a man whose name alone could sell tickets; Hollywood’s shift from star vehicles to intellectual property, from big screen to small, can now be neatly tracked over the arc of his career.“Star Wars” united a country — crossing geographic, class and political lines — enthralling audiences who gathered in theaters to share in its fairy-tale story of love and adventure. These days, audiences are made up of friends and family gathered in a living room, and Ford faces questions about whether the “Yellowstone” franchise is a paean to Red America.“I’m aware of the interest in the politics of the characters,” he said, adding that he had no interest in the political beliefs of Jacob Dutton. (Ford, who was born in Chicago to Democratic parents and supported Joe Biden against Donald Trump in 2020, suggested that the audience for “Yellowstone” was so vast that it was unlikely to be made up of only Republicans.)When Ford began working on “1923,” Sheridan told him to approach it as if it was 10 hourlong movies. “And that’s the way it feels to me,” Ford said. “But we’re working at a television pace. There’s something about movies that allows for, you know, a little bit, you know, a kind of luxury of time and a certain …”He hesitated as he considered the risks of a road better not taken, of Harrison Ford weighing in on the merits of movies versus television. “I don’t think I really want to get too deep into this because there’s no place to go with it, for me.”“I’m doing the same job,” he said. “It’s just being boxed and distributed in a different way.”At a time when many contemporaries are winding down, Ford still keeps a demanding schedule. “I love it,” he said of his work. “It’s what I’ve spent my life doing.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesFord is not a pioneer. He resisted television for many years, and in finally relenting, he is following other major box office stars — Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone” and Sylvester Stallone on “Tulsa King” — who have joined Taylor Sheridan television productions.Still, as he prepared to attend the premiere of “1923,” at a big screen tucked away in an American Legion Hall in Hollywood, it was clear where his heart remained.“The important thing is to go into a dark room with strangers, experience the same thing and have an opportunity to consider your common humanity,” Ford said. “With strangers. And the music — the sound system is better, right? The dark is deeper, right? And the icebox not so close.”Ford paused at his revealing reference to a kitchen appliance from another era — the era when he grew up. He could not help but laugh at his lapse. “Icebox!” he said. More

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      Mo Brings Plenty Was About to Quit Acting. Then Came ‘Yellowstone.’

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      The actor wasn’t satisfied with the Native representation he saw onscreen. Now he’s helping TV’s biggest drama get it right.In a scene from Season 3 of the hit neo-Western series “Yellowstone,” Mo, the steady right hand and loyal fixer of the Native American power broker Thomas Rainwater, lights some sage and lets the smoke waft through Rainwater’s office. They’re about to meet with Angela Blue Thunder (Q’orianka Kilcher), a hard-charging Native lawyer with a take-no-prisoners attitude toward going after the Montana ranch land owned by John Dutton (Kevin Costner).Angela contemptuously douses the sage with water, but Mo — played by the actor Mo Brings Plenty — with a “who is this person?” look on his face, relights it after she leaves, allowing his boss to breathe in some of its healing powers. The moment contains both seriousness and subtle humor.“In our culture, we use these items to cleanse the space and protect the mind,” Brings Plenty said in a recent video interview from Fort Worth, Texas, where “Yellowstone,” on Paramount Network, had its Season 5 premiere screening this month. “But burning sage and sweet grass has become a fad and has been culturally misappropriated,” he added, and those substances “are sacred to us.” For Brings Plenty, getting these details right is crucial.“On and off the set, Mo really tries to be a bridge connecting Indigenous people with our industry in film,” said Kilcher, who is of Indigenous South American heritage. “It’s amazing to see all the good work that he’s doing.”In a series that takes great care with its Native American characters and story lines, Brings Plenty keeps it as real as anyone. Onscreen he exudes a quiet strength, even when his character is executing some of the show’s frequently unsavory business. Offscreen he’s an adviser and a trusted confidante of the “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan and his creative team. He even wrangles horses.Playing a character who started off as Rainwater’s nameless driver, Brings Plenty has gradually become a regular presence, especially in episodes that involve Native rituals. At the end of Season 4, he conducts a hanbleceya, a sort of vision quest, for Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes), a white character married to a Native American woman, Monica (Kelsey Asbille). In a moving scene from the most recent episode, which aired on Sunday, he oversees a burial ritual for the son that died at birth after Monica was in a car accident.From left, Gil Birmingham, Brings Plenty and Luke Grimes in Season 5.Paramount NetworkThat last sequence hit home for Brings Plenty, whose mother lost three infant sons when he was a child. “It was a powerful moment, and very real for me,” he said.Brings Plenty, 53, was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota — though his mother is from the Cheyenne River Reservation and he has relatives on the Rosebud Reservation, also both in South Dakota.“I spent time on all three reservations, so I always say I grew up in the Lakota Nation,” he said.His interest in acting dates back to the days when he would ask children on the reservation why they didn’t have more pride in their identity. The most common answer? They never saw themselves on TV.“So I thought, ‘How do I change that?’” he said. “Because I wasn’t on TV either.”He added: “The misrepresentation of us has been occurring for so long.” He saw an opportunity to be the change he wanted to see.He started in theater, worked his way into stunt riding (“I knew I could fall off a horse and take it”), then began landing supporting roles in film and television (“Hell on Wheels,” “The Revenant”).But just a few years ago, he was ready to pack it in and return to his ranch in Kansas. Appreciative of his opportunities, he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the Native representation he saw onscreen. He felt discouraged. He and his family agreed that he would wait until the end of the year to make a decision. That’s when “Yellowstone” came calling.Gil Birmingham, who plays Thomas Rainwater and has been friends with Brings Plenty for several years, likes to tell the story of how the character Mo got his name on the show. Sheridan had not given the character a name — he was just Rainwater’s driver — and during one of the many scenes between Birmingham and Brings Plenty, Birmingham called his old friend by his real name: “Mo”(short for Moses).“So Taylor decided that he was going to use that name for the character as well,” Birmingham said in a phone interview. “When Mo is out and about, it’s pretty funny because people tend to call you by your character name, and it happens to be his real name. There’s no distinction there for fans.”When fans do recognize Brings Plenty in public, it’s often because of his braids, which hang below his waist. As with most matters in Mo’s world, the braids carry cultural significance.“We wear two braids as men to honor the gifts of the women,” he said.“One strand” of each braid “represents the higher power,” he continued. “The second strand represents the Earth, which is also a physical being. The third strand represents our spirit. It’s a reminder that if we can live with that balance of all things, and we bring them all together, it makes a braid that is strong.”For Sheridan, Brings Plenty’s overriding quality is truthfulness.“There is a real honesty to Mo’s acting — a comfortable vulnerability,” Sheridan said in an email. “One of the great things about long-form storytelling is that it allows me to react to actors who really shine. Mo began as a co-star on the show, and now he is a series regular. That is how much his portrayal leapt from the screen.”“Mo brings a great stability and a great loyalty, and you just have a sense that you’re being protected and you’re safe with Mo around,” Birmingham says of Brings Plenty’s character. Barrett Emke for The New York TimesThe dynamics among the Native American characters on the broadly drawn “Yellowstone” are probably the show’s most nuanced. Thomas Rainwater, the most prominent Native character, did not grow up on the reservation; he is a suit-and-tie-wearing graduate of Harvard Business School who applies his knowledge to his duties as chairman of the Confederated Tribes of Broken Rock. Mo did grow up on the reservation; one could argue that he operates closer to the culture than his boss. Angela Blue Thunder is also from the reservation, and she has scores to settle with the Dutton family.They all have one thing in common: They want the land that they see as rightfully theirs — and that the Duttons fiercely protect as their own.“Mo brings a great cultural anchoring, and a perspective that tries to balance out the kind of world that Thomas Rainwater is operating in — that is, a system of laws and paradigms that aren’t familiar for, or operated by, the Native people,” Birmingham said of Brings Plenty’s character. “Mo brings a great stability and a great loyalty, and you just have a sense that you’re being protected and you’re safe with Mo around.”These are heady times for Native American representation on television, with a great quantity and range of characters and stories. “Dark Winds,” on AMC +, follows two Navajo policemen investigating a mysterious double murder. ABC’s “Alaska Daily,” about the doings of a scrappy Anchorage newspaper, shines a light on the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women, a subject also featured on “Yellowstone” and in Sheridan’s 2017 film “Wind River” (its cast includes Birmingham and Asbille of “Yellowstone”). Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs,” a droll comedy about four teenagers growing up on an Oklahoma reservation, won a prestigious Peabody Award.“‘Yellowstone’ was the catalyst to make room, to give space and inspiration for others to get involved with Native stories and give Native people opportunities,” Brings Plenty said. “We’ve often been left behind, but the way I see it and understand it, Taylor Sheridan said: ‘Come on, let’s go. That’s enough of you guys being back there. Let’s bring you up to the forefront.’”Sheridan says it’s a matter of accuracy.“One cannot accurately tell the story of the West without telling the story of the original inhabitants of the region,” he said. “Sure, ‘Yellowstone’ is highly dramatized, but the story lines are all rooted in truth. To ignore the impact of our settlement on Native people is to tell half the story. And the Native American half has been habitually ignored by the entertainment industry. We don’t ignore it. We look right at it.”For Brings Plenty, it’s all about honoring his culture and his ancestors — not just other Lakota, but all Native Americans.“My grandparents, they always said: ‘Speak Indian. Dance Indian. Sing Indian,’” he said. “They never said, ‘Speak Lakota’ — everything was Indian. So we try to remember those teachings and pass them on.” More

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      ‘Those Who Wish Me Dead’ Review: A Desperate Scramble to Survive

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      This thriller starring Angelina Jolie takes its time but doesn’t waste any time.I’m not sure I believed the plot for a minute of “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” but as a means of pitting righteous characters against implacable assassins in a succession of abrupt, pitiless, life-or-death confrontations, the story has a terse effectiveness. The film, based on the 2014 novel by Michael Koryta, has been brought to the screen by the writer-director Taylor Sheridan. Although he isn’t the sole screenwriter here, the film paints in the bold, primal strokes of his scripts for “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” without getting bogged down in the sloggy self-seriousness of his previous directorial feature, “Wind River.”The movie takes its time, but it also doesn’t waste time. The main pair do not meet until almost 40 minutes in. Until then, “Those Who Wish Me Dead” patiently juggles different narrative lines. One, initially the least interesting, involves Hannah (Angelina Jolie), a daredevil smoke jumper who has had a barely veiled death wish ever since her poor judgment of forest fire winds led to the deaths of three children. (Only a movie would so quickly entrust another boy to her care, to offer a chance at redemption.) In an indication of how “Those Who Wish Me Dead” never asks to be judged on plausibility, the film twice puts Hannah in the path of lightning strikes. There is an almost comic casualness to the way she dumps antiseptic on each new wound.The movie also tracks Connor (Finn Little), the precocious son of a Florida forensic accountant, Owen (Jake Weber). Owen has discovered something that could get both of them killed. The nature of the discovery is the film’s MacGuffin — all we know is that governors and congressmen would be implicated by its disclosure, and that they are scared enough that the government (or someone government-adjacent) has hired two fixers (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) to kill anyone with the information. (Tyler Perry, who makes a deferred entrance and appears in only one scene, plays their boss.)The hit men are introduced faking a gas line explosion to murder a district attorney; they have few qualms about killing bystanders. They are also skilled investigators who deduce that Owen and Connor have run to Montana, where Owen’s former brother-in-law, Ethan (Jon Bernthal), and Ethan’s pregnant wife, Allison (Medina Senghore), run, yup, a survival school, and where Connor will eventually meet Hannah. It’s emblematic of Sheridan’s efficiency that when Ethan the uncle and Connor the nephew finally connect, the movie doesn’t pause to have them say hello.All of this is elemental stuff, a battle between unmitigated darkness (in the form of the fast-thinking killers) and total virtue, as Hannah and Connor struggle to reach safety, then retreat, then run again, all while outwitting a forest fire that Gillen’s character has set to the distract the locals. New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.Those Who Wish Me DeadRated R. Cruel and especially upsetting violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More