Loyalty is one of the most commendable attributes a human can have. The Ballad of Lefty Brown’s protagonist has it in spades. Through a lifetime of cow wrangling, outlaw chasing, and fencepost setting, Lefty (Bill Pullman) has been there for his best friend and patron, the newly elected Sen. Edward Johnson (Peter Fonda), in 1880s Montana. Lefty’s not all there—he’s not mentally disabled, just a dim bulb who has never been expected to be anything brighter—but he’s beloved and eternally trusted by his pal to do what’s right for their ranch while Edward heads off to the District of Columbia.
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| Photo credit: The Ballad of Lefty Brown/IMDb |
Edward is loyal in his own way, but his loyalty is to something more oblique than Lefty’s. He sees the state he has been elected to represent as an ideal, a place for ruggedness that should never be touched by the railroad and other forms of industrialization. It’s what he ran on. It’s what he won on. It’s a stubborn kind of devotion, but he plans to remain loyal to this idea in Congress.
That is, until an assassin’s bullet strikes Edward down before he can be sworn into office.
As you can see, there’s a downside to loyalty. It enables your most self-defeating traits if the beneficiary of the loyalty doesn’t push you to grow into a more complete person. For all his geniality and goodwill toward Lefty, Edward never gave him anything to do beyond the most menial tasks. This leaves Lefty to sleep beside other hired ranch hands in cramped beds stacked close in a musty barn. He’s erased from Edward’s adventurous history that’s retold, with plenty of dramatic exaggeration, in dime store novels. If Lefty is recalled at all, it’s as the Mose Harper (The Searchers’ comic relief) to Edward’s Ethan Edwards (John Wayne’s protagonist from that film was almost certainly the inspiration for this character’s name). Sure, Lefty and Mose both assisted legendary figures, lived in idyllic landscapes at the edge of the known world, and partook in grand adventures. But they were always the grunt workers, the mostly useless goofballs whose innocence and loyalty are all their “betters” believed they had to offer.
The Ballad of Lefty Brown writer-director Jared Moshé believes in his main character more than the other hardened western archetypes who appear on the screen with him. Moshé understands the power of learning, of one’s potential to grow into autonomy at any age. The film’s tagline, “A coming-of-age Western for a 65-year-old man,” could easily play as a throwaway joke, and Pullman’s portrayal of Lefty can be a little broad and silly, especially early in the film. But the tagline is meant earnestly and it’s investigated thoroughly as Lefty sets out on a revenge mission that doubles as a clean and simple lesson: We are all capable of learning and bettering ourselves, no matter our starting point.
Moshé, working with cinematographer David McFarland, revels in classic western imagery in the movie’s early going. Tall grass bends to the wind’s will, plateaus loom in the distance like benevolent guardians, snakes rattle through the rich soil, and horses gallop across landscapes that appear as if they can never end, all while H. Scott Salinas’s score whistles and hums pleasant, major-chord odes to classic Hollywood and Americana. This is Edward’s country, a place untouched by the choking smoke of the corrupt East Coast, but it’s a change he cannot hold off forever. It’s a change that could mean great things for the citizens he says he wants to represent. Against this backdrop Lefty is miniscule, a fidgety fellow with a high voice (at times Pullman makes Lefty sound like a cowboy version of the hapless miscreant Charlie Day plays on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia) who can’t think up the right words he wants to say in any situation—he is the citizen whose interests and potential for growth Edward ignores.
But as the film goes on and Lefty must fend not only for himself but for a teenage boy he takes under his wing (Diego Josef), words begin to come out of his mouth more forcefully. Moshé and McFarland gradually inch the camera closer to Lefty’s hairy face—the beard cannot obscure the panic, loneliness, and heartbreak this man feels as he must do things on his own for the first time ever, all while mourning the greatest personal loss imaginable to him—and the sun-drenched vistas disappear into memory. In their place are harsh realizations of betrayal, the emergence of legitimate detective skills, and a sense of purpose that this man had never before known.
The innocence that had been so fiercely protected by others is gone, but now he has integrity. He has internalized the “good lawman” lessons his friend had unwittingly taught him, and he puts them to good use in tracking down that friend’s killers and those who paid for the job.
And in the end, The Ballad of Lefty Brown is a song about finding dignity.
Director: Jared Moshé
Writer: Jared Moshé
Starring: Bill Pullman, Peter Fonda, Diego Josef, Tommy Flanagan, Jim Caviezel, Kathy Baker
Rating: 4/5 stars
Available in limited release and on demand now
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