The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017)

The Ballad of Lefty Brown is not so much a ballad as a travesty. Filled with shallow, stereotyped characters; mumbling, incoherent dialogue; mystifying exposition, and pointless characters who take up screen time without being relevant to the story.

For a film with such an impressive cast, including Bill Pullman (While You Were Sleeping), Jim Caviezel (Passion of Christ), Tom Flanagan (Gladiator), and Joe Anderson (Hannibal), the performances are pretty poor. Tom Flanagan and Joe Anderson do the best with what they’ve been given – a dreadful script – but Pullman’s performance is what turned this film from simply ‘very dull’ into something worse.

The ‘hero’ is Bill Pullman’s man-child character ‘Lefty Brown’, who is chasing down the men who murdered his friend. On his journey, he is joined by a young boy, Jeremiah, who manages to avoid having any impact on the story at all, and appears to be there to give the main character a chance to try and explain the plot to the audience.

The film follows a predictable route – cowboys riding over the plains, a couple of bar brawls, a shootout, and the bad guy is trussed up and dragged along for the ride. This all happens against a backdrop of Lefty recalling, in his uniquely dimwitted way, events from the past. This kind of cross-country storytelling would have been a good opportunity for some sweeping cinematography of Montana where the film was shot. Unfortunately, The Ballad of Lefty looks filmed on the cheap, and visually is more reminiscent of an old episode of a TV show like Little House on the Prairie.

Heroes and villains are part of the rock-solid structure of the Western genre, but in The Ballad of Lefty the characters on either side aren’t well-developed. There’s no real conflict and what conflict there is feels false and contrived. There are no moral dilemmas such as in Clint Eastwood’s amazing Unforgiven. The men in Unforgiven had dark sides, the men in The Ballad of Lefty Brown are stereotypes. The film has nothing at all to say about the old West, about violence, about revenge, or heroes, or buddies, or good guys and bad guys, or anything else.

The best performance is by the Scottish actor Tommy Flanagan but even then, the film is under-developed and badly edited.

I’d love to see more Westerns being made, I haven’t watched many and they’ve fallen out of favour but there’s so many opportunities to tell great stories in that era, with American landscapes having a starring role. It would be great to see this genre developed again.