Creator: Graham Roland
261 minutes (15) 2022
Acorn Blu-ray
Rating: 8/10
Review by Steven Hampton
“Have you seen any witches in your dreams?”
This TV mystery is derived, partly, from Errol Morris’ movie The Dark Wind (1991), which starred Lou Diamond Phillips and Fred Ward. Graham Roland’s excellent spin-off delivers franchised revisionism, adapted from Tony Hillerman’s novels, efficiently combining weird (modern-) western tropes, with a character-study focus that’s very like the crime dramas of Nic Pizzolatto’s gothic styled anthology show, True Detective (2014).
Despite being set in the 1970s, like the original books, it’s a lively updated scenario, with solid production values. Armed robbers using a helicopter are tracked but lost at Monument Valley, on the Navajo reservation, where native folklore traditions and the social pressures of tribal policing mix into an uneasy balance that's very unlike the themes of Lone Ranger and Tonto. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), meets new deputy Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and there’s workplace displacement friction, but some romantic attraction, between Chee and Sergeant Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten). These local cops are insulted when a ‘motel murders’ case - linked to activists of the Buffalo Society, is rudely taken over by FBI agents. Plenty of regional DinĂ© dialogue helps to forge the cultural authenticity, and historical heritage, of many scenes on seemingly haunted landscapes, in a ‘twilight zone’ where spooky wisdom appears linked to freaky weather.
“Remember, what you see and hear in ‘ceremony’, stays in ceremony.”
Ethnic horror movies like Nightwing (1979), and The Manitou (1978), can easily be seen as laying the foundations for this sophisticated scripting about an often neglected ‘secret’ world. Everything’s connected like theft and corruption, violence and 'black magic', family feuds and land-owners’ rights. There are no clear-cut heroes and villains, partly because tragedy and brutality are eventually revealed on both deceptive sides of survival choices, lacking profit motives or any justice. Providing most of the comic-relief, Rainn Wilson plays a car-salesman. The show didn’t need this crude level of clown-humour, but ‘Devoted Dan’ does embody some cynicism about religious ignorance and a white-man’s casual disregard of the indigenous American people, that fits - however clumsily - into this endlessly fascinating era.
Disc 2 extras:
Behind-the-scenes featurette Show Me More (32 mins.) includes exec. producers George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford.
