You Love to See It: Deadwood

“Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?” says Wild Bill Hickock to his friend Charlie Utter. Actor Keith Carradine, who played Hicock in the first few episodes of David Milch’s Deadwood, says it like a man holding on for all he’s worth not to life but to the long, slow death by alcohol and gambling he’s chosen for himself. There is dignity in it, and self-loathing anger. An exhausted species of conviction. Carradine keeps his face still during his delivery, his stare intense but dull, his mouth moving stiffly with his precise enunciation, opposed to the character’s usual soft-spoken drawl. It’s a moment which reveals more about Hickock than any flashback or story arc could, drawing his character out not from plot but from the way he confronts life and the sudden crushing sense of what his own has been like.

As Charlie Utter, Dayton Callie moves from frustration with Bill to outright anger to the blustering, embarrassed edge of tears with as much choleric upset as Carradine has restrained, inexorable presence. He pulls faces, bobs his head, and lets his entire body talk with him as though he believes he can pull Bill back to a life of prospecting and newlywed bliss with actual physical force. The two men play off each other with a rich sense of personal history. At no point does it feel like Charlie is encountering these tendencies of Bill’s for the first time, and nor does it feel as though Bill is undergoing some final personal collapse. It’s a deeply depressed man whose friend, sick of trying to help him when he so plainly doesn’t want to be helped, has reached the end of his rope. 

The conversation’s setting further enriches its personal weight. The hotel of the loathsome, spineless E. B. Farnum (William Sanderson) is a cheerless interstitial space, a bleak setting for such an intimate argument. The walls are bare, the floors stained, the beds shapeless. There is an air of indifference to it that makes Hicock, who dresses in the hotel’s neutral colors and remains still throughout the scene after sitting on the bed, feel as though he’s sinking into the set while Charlie argues with him, out of place against the sessile backdrop. Director Alan Taylor shoots Bill close up and perfectly still, focusing entirely on his face. Charlie, meanwhile, is framed on the left of the screen and frequently facing away from both Bill and the camera. The scene is set after midnight and the room is gently lit by a kerosene lamp.

At last the fight goes out of Charlie. His shoulders slump. “Yeah,” he says quietly, gathering his things and heading for the door. “I can do that.”