For certain types of audiences, it can be either funny or even disappointing when early in “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the main character skins a raccoon to bind up a bad cut on his leg instead of crafting a hat like those worn by Fess Parker in his role as the character on Disney’s long-running TV adventure series and its movie spin-offs that are still being watched today. Maybe this is Derek Estlin Purvis’ way of winking at us. More likely though, he wants us to understand right from the start that this is not a traditional Wild Frontier story.
In director Derek Estlin Purvis’ leisurely paced historical drama, which William Moseley (“The Chronicles of Narnia”) plays convincingly as the frontiersman Crockett in its occasional moments of suspense but mostly dull, the focus is on him during his tenure as an outspoken critic who opposed President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act (among others). This speechless part played Edward Finlay came with enough waxworks make-up for someone to think him one. However, it is Colm Meaney who stars beside them that rules the picture with his voluminously wicked performance as Caleb Powell who runs Middle Tennessee trappers for the Northeast Fur Trading Company with an iron hand.
Crockett’s young sons William (Nico Tirozzi) and John (Wyatt Parker) irritate Powell by taking a raccoon from one of his company traps without knowing that they had done anything wrong while their father was doing business in Washington D.C. It should also be noted that these boys are not thieves but rather children who desperately seek food for themselves and their sick mother Polly (Valeria Jane Parker). They thought no one would notice if just one pelt would go missing; unfortunately they were wrong.
During his ride home to see his wife who has fallen seriously ill to find out she has died, Crockett is assaulted by a wolf, hence the coonskin-bandage, and he also has an aside where he saves a stray Indian (Grey Wolf Herrera) from being killed by murderers from another tribe. (He gets his just deserts in the last frame.)
As soon as the frontiersman returns to his family’s cabin, Powell has found the boys and falsely charged them with stealing dozens of other furs. Crockett says no only to be beaten severely by Powell’s men who stop when they think he’s dead. Again that was also a major blunder.
Throughout most of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” there is always the nagging feeling that about an hour’s worth of plot was stretched out into a feature-length film. On the contrary, this expansion allows Purvis enough time to go through aspects of period establishing and character developing details often missed in movies representing 19th century frontier survival. Besides those historical enthusiasts who will be held spellbound when the movie slows down to show how Crockett builds himself a lean-to while convalescing from his injuries in the wilderness and later breaks in a wild horse as his new mount.
For those who prefer to fast forward impatiently during non-theatrical streaming, well, they can still savor cinematographer James King’s beautiful shooting of the locations in and around Kingston Springs, Tenn., and Stephen Keech’s appropriately old-school musical score. Taylor Bills’ opening credits set with dramatically colored illustration also deserved a mention.
The lines from various people sound like flowery language when you hear them speaking; but it is much to Moseley’s credit that he never cracks up or loses his seriousness even as he says things like “I am not able to stop ordinary men from attacking my family. How will I stop barbarians from destroying the nation?” Or better still “If I let you go free, are we going to have another confrontation?”
However, Meaney is the biggest thing here, giving Powell an Irish accent while bizarrely wearing a top hat and chewing on every piece of scenery imaginable so that one would not be shocked if other actors also begin losing parts of their bodies. He sounds like an insatiable beast with a Shakespearean touch whenever he roars out “I will have my pound of flesh.” Deep down inside you know this kind always gets what’s coming to him in movies such as these. But sometimes it makes one wonder: Could it be different this time?
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