Friday, July 02, 2010
Justified: “where extended chit-chats erupt into very violent conclusions”
The Straits Times (Singapore)
BYLINE: tay yek keak, couch grouch
You do know we’re not allowed to shoot people on sight anymore?’ US marshal Raylan Givens (Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant) is reminded in the justifiably compelling Justified.
The man is a walking anachronism, a cowboy from the Wild West, transplanted to his rural, redneck hometown in Kentucky to take the heat off after shooting a bad guy too publicly in swanky Miami.
The place, though, is full of talkative baddies whose primary function is to provide a sounding board and a target board for the lawman to fire off both his gun and his mouth.
Welcome to a, well, new kind of talk show as detailed by Elmore Leonard, America’s premier crime fiction writer of the black-comedy genre, where extended chit-chats erupt into very violent conclusions.
The South loves yarn spinners and people continue talking here even when there is a bullet in their belly.
Based on Leonard’s (Be Cool) short story, Fire In The Hole, this series is great for viewers who like their drama to go with a drawl, draw of guns and inhabitants drawn in gritty, funny arsenic doses.
Leonard’s penchant is to look at the underbelly of the underbelly, where crooks, fugitives, racists, goons and inbred lowlife live to give the upright marshal a kind of urbane-exterminator aura as he saunters in with his cowboy hat, badge and a gun in his hip holster.
The marshal is forceful but reasonable, polite with escape-clause choices which nobody seems to take up.
‘Second option, next time I see you I kill you,’ he recommends.
Boy, how times have changed since Dennis Weaver’s urban cowboy McCloud ambled into New York City in the 1970s.
The modern world is lined with all sorts of crass complexities, and Olyphant is a thoughtful, laconic Clint Eastwood of genteel mannerisms until his ungentle manners explode.
He has an ex-wife and an outlaw father to mull over.
Here is a fresh character of such movie-sized proportions it tells you that TV is now the best home for scriptwriters.
Which other show can give you darkly comic philosophy on the go before a dumb blaze of glory?
‘When you shot the thug in Miami, was there food on the table like this?’ a villain asks at the dining table before the shooting starts.
Southern hospitality, I tell you, has never looked this good.
