"“Comanche Moon,” a six-hour mini-series beginning Sunday on CBS, is based on Larry McMurtry’s novel of the same title, and begins as it ends, with the camera retreating from the image of a distraught child. Both the first boy and the second have lost their mothers to the ravages of the 19th-century Texas frontier. At the start an Indian boy stands over the bloodied corpse of his mother, killed by white marauders, an experience that will forge his career as a fierce warrior, grounding it even deeper in the justifying soils of victimhood. The book, the last so far in Mr. McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” series (though it comes second in the chronology of the story), ends with an incident about a mule and a missed opportunity for violent score-settling, but the final moments of this mini-series (with a script by Mr. McMurtry and Diana Ossana) show us the illegitimate son of a Texas Ranger, Woodrow Call, staring into the dusk sky, orphaned by his mother’s consumption and rejected by his father. Like a public-service announcement for more enlightened foster care, the story wants to remind us that even in the most ungovernable places, parental unruliness is the most wounding kind. “Comanche Moon” follows Woodrow Call and his friend Gus McCrae in the years before Mr. Jones and Mr. Duvall turn them into wizened, cattle-driving old men. Still, they are a study in contrasts: Woodrow (Karl Urban), the lover of history who denies his own as it claws at him; Gus (Steve Zahn), who drinks up whatever is in front of him. Neglecting their romantic lives, they enlist with the Rangers, pursuing the Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and his half-breed son, Blue Duck, who never seems to meet a woman he doesn’t want to rape or an animal he wouldn’t mind beating or a camp he isn’t motivated to pillage. Just as Mr. McMurtry’s women are typically whores or consumptives (or both), the Indians of “Comanche Moon” are either spiritualists who speak in methodical cadences and stroke feathers to the sound of wind instruments, or patricidal maniacs bent on racial vengeance. Eight years into the new millennium, American Indians are still portrayed on screen according to a range of stereotypes no broader than the one laid out for blacks during the era of Al Jolson." Get the Story:
Out West, Where the Ladies Are Consumptive and the Men Confused (The New York Times 1/11)
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