Most reviews seem to look at this through the prism of "Deadwood," which seems unfair as the elongated TV format allows for far more character development. So to point out that the characters in "Wild Bill" aren't as-- well, you get the picture. Viewed alone, the movie deserves praise for performance, set design, a sense of period dialogue and historical accuracy in visual recreations. Yes, WB really did wear Navy Colts backwards, cavalry-style, in a red sash; yes, he did have greasy lanks of hair and wear a big floppy hat, a thick tie and a vest that didn't match his jacket which didn't match his pants. And for about an hour, I think the movie is pretty amusing. But when it sinks into Deadwood over its last hour, it appears to use too much of the stagey dialogue of one of its sources, a play by someone named Thomas Babe. At this point, it pretty much abandons history which is bad enough, but also cinematic fluency, of which Hill is a master: it becomes static, talky, dreary, and completely loses its momentum. And someone--Babe?--made the decision to give the McCall-Hickcock dynamic an Oedipal overtone--he's the "son" of a woman once loved , then abandoned, by Hickcock. This is an attempt at coherency, to bring the murder into some sort of classic framework. Yeah, swell, however: McCall was much older, a buffalo hunter who'd lost dough to Wild Bill the night before. He didn't stand for the abused son, he stood for the randomness of frontier violence, where booze, pride, stupidity and a culture of pointless aggression could easily spell an ambush murder like McCall's. THAT, to me, would not only have been more accurate, but more fluent and a better movie.
