TV Review : A Sympathetic but Overly Long ‘Billy the Kid’

There’s every reason to entertain high hopes for “Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid,” one of the first major movies made especially for Ted Turner’s TNT cable network. (It plays tonight at 5 and 8, with additional air dates May 14 and 25.) The author of “1876” and “Lincoln,” Vidal can be counted on to do his historical homework, if nothing else, and William Bonney’s legend could stand some of the eccentric detail that is inevitably real life in addition to the familiar myth.

Alas, there’s nothing at all unfamiliar about “Vidal’s Billy,” which ultimately is no more of a work of filmic art than “Gore Vidal’s Caligula.” Lesson to be learned: Beware of possessive credits, especially when film makers claim ownership of the grave-bound.

The shocking truth that screenwriter Vidal has uncovered about Billy: He was a really nice guy . Dumb as an ox, mind you, and a wee bit quick to vengeance, perhaps, but a sweet Kid nonetheless. “I never kil’t a man but I was right,” the tragically misunderstood gunslinger naively protests in vain.

Val Kilmer (“Willow”) plays Billy as a callow, illiterate, high-spirited youth with a voice barely beyond puberty and a mouth constantly agape. It’s certainly different from Kris Kristofferson’s seasoned, cynical Billy in Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” and an interpretation probably far closer to the truth.

Even if Peckinpah’s version bought the legend more than the facts, his underrated revisionist Western still looms like a giant over this shadowy little wisp of a picture, which recovers the same thematic territory with little style or verve. The doom-laden exchanges between Billy and Pat--with Billy reminiscing about their good times as outlaws, and the lawman babbling about how one has to change with the West’s changing times--could be right out of Peckinpah’s picture, if the writing weren’t so pedestrian.

Vidal’s limitations as a dialogist are in fact much more revelatory than any light he has to shed on old cliches. Only a few touches in the mostly hacklike teleplay are remotely “writerly”: The author has a cameo as a minister reading from Ecclesiastes, and toward the end, Vidal has expended what little effort he has on an equally ecclesiastical drunkard’s speech about the nature of fame. “To be a name on the lips of men--is anything so sweet, so brief?”

Even Solomon would probably conclude that “Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid” is--at less than two hours--not nearly brief enough.