‘Broken Trail’ brand: unrevisionist western

“Broken Trail,” a new western miniseries airing Sunday and Monday nights, is the “first ever original movie event” from AMC, and it’s an auspicious beginning on most every level. Even were there nothing in it to recommend but the quiet, lyrical performances of Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church as an uncle and nephew driving a herd of 500 mustangs from Oregon to Wyoming just before the turn of the century, it would be worth a look. The film strikes remarkably few false notes (a few too-convenient situations; a mathematically expendable character who is duly expended; unfortunate what-happened-afterward titles at the end), but those it does are soon over and gone with the wind. In any case, they don’t spoil the music.

Walter Hill, who has made more westerns than most directors, including the revered “The Long Riders” and the pilot episode of “Deadwood,” directs from a script by first-time screenwriter Alan Geoffrion, an old friend of Duvall’s. (The actor helped develop the project.) Cinematographer Lloyd Ahern, a frequent Hill collaborator, has framed his images in such a way as to make the action feel immediately present; there is very little wasted space on the screen. It’s a little movie that feels big, without being self-consciously cinematic.

“Brokeback Mountain” notwithstanding, westerns are rarely seen on the big screen nowadays, but they appear on the small with some regularity. (Hallmark Channel is airing three original westerns in July, and they were a staple of TBS under Ted Turner.) There is something still reliable about the genre, something written almost genetically into the culture, while the sweeping scenery and endless skies and galloping horses and galumphing cattle deliver sure-fire big effects at a relatively reasonable price. (It’s easier to stage a convincing western than it is, say, a convincing 1930s gangster flick.)

At the same time, the Big Western Themes have been mined until they’re nearly dry. (“Deadwood” succeeds by being less a tale of the Old West than of New Capital.) What makes “Broken Trail” feel fresh -- perhaps “refreshing” is the better word -- is that it isn’t out to tell you anything definitive or deep about America or Americans, or refract the present metaphorically through the past, but just to tell a story and to afford you time with some well-rounded, recognizably human characters who are exceptional only in unexceptional ways. None of them are wholly original -- their close cousins have inhabited myriad westerns that have come before -- but for the most part they’re played as if they are.

The story finds our ordinary heroes with the unexpected custody of five Chinese women who were to have been sold into prostitution and whom they will ultimately have to defend from the people who bought them. This is an old gambit, the mismatched traveling companions -- their charges speak only Mandarin, which is sometimes subtitled and sometimes not -- but it doesn’t feel contrived. Much of the drama derives from attempts and failures to communicate, and from the women’s inability to comprehend what’s going on around them.

It’s an old-fashioned western in that it’s strictly a case of good guys versus very bad -- the modern exploration of the gray area is given a miss here -- although the good guys do some things we might think of us as bad now, here in the paved New West. (Frontier justice, I think it’s called.) Still, they are all large of spirit: Duvall and Church are taciturn in the Gary Cooper mold, men who take each person at his or her measure, regardless of color, creed or previous employment. There is little in the way of character development; these characters know who they are, and they affect each other’s fate without becoming implausibly different themselves.

The film has bursts of violence, but it’s less concerned with violence than with the big open spaces in which it occurs, and the small spaces between the players. Its best moments are its quietest -- conversations on what sort of stitch to use to sew up a man’s head, or old family business, or the moon, and there are lots of interesting bits about life a century back deftly masked in the unusually musical dialogue. (Reportedly, the network pushed for more typical gunslinging melodrama, and Duvall threatened to walk out over it.) Spread over two nights, “Broken Trail” is long and relatively slow, like a Neil Young song, and it’s a shame that its mostly laconic mood will be repeatedly shattered by commercial breaks. But perhaps you can TiVo through them or wait for the DVD. At least shut the sound off during the ads.

Gwendoline Yeo, Olivia Cheng, Valerie Tian, Jadyn Wong and Caroline Chan are the Chinese girls; Greta Scacchi is the good bad girl, like Claire Trevor in “Stagecoach”; Chris Mulkey plays the heavy; Scott Cooper is a musical traveling companion. The music is by Van Dyke Parks and David Mansfield (the roller-skating fiddler in “Heaven’s Gate”). All do excellent work.

*

‘Broken Trail’

Where: AMC

When: 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for coarse language and violence)