aka Pioneers

• Directed by Buzz Kulik
• Written by Suzanne Clauser
• Starring
  • Joanna Pettet
  • William Shatner
  • David Janssen
  • Lance LeGaunt
  • Helen Hunt

Pioneer Woman probably would have been remembered only in footnotes as the unremarkable ABC made-for-TV movie that it is, except that a certain B-list actor who co-starred was on his way to becoming a pop culture icon. Nowadays, thanks to what must have been some sort of copyright booboo, every cut-rate DVD company that can get their hands on a washed-out print (or a competitor’s DVD to copy) has stamped out a dollar DVD of it with William Shatner’s face slapped on the cover. Even with Shatner’s stagey theatrics on display (for part of the running time, anyway), it’s not a particularly memorable film. Why? Shucks, I was hoping you would ask me that. Stick around for the next thousand words, won’t you?

The star, as I mentioned, isn’t Shatner; it’s Joanna Pettet as Maggie Sergeant, a housewife in 1867 Indiana, before they called them “housewives.” Her husband John (that’s William Shatner, behind a huge moustache) takes it into his head to leaving his job as a store clerk and take his wife and their two children to 80 acres he’s just bought in Nebraska. He didn’t consult with her about it; he just shows up with a deed to the land and an announcement that they’re leaving inside of a week. Maggie had been planning just that day to tell him that she’s pregnant, but after some half-hearted protests about the suddenness of it all she just mums up and acts dutiful.

“But… I need my pain!”

A train ride later, they’re part of a wagon train heading over Nebraska, her necessities and her fine china packed in the back of a prairie schooner. Maggie writes incessantly in her journal about her anxiety about the journey but how happy John is, blah blah blah. At last, they split off from the wagon train and venture on their own to the little clump of shacks that will be their neighbors.

Only trouble is, they’re not neighbors; they’re squatters on the land that John just purchased, and they don’t aim to give up their seven years homesteading just because the Sergeants has a deed. The four menfolk hold John’s head down in their well pond repeatedly — waterboarding, an American tradition! — but he still won’t consent until Maggie, stressed at seeing her husband treated that way, spontaneously aborts. Broken, John consents to sign over the deed and take the squatters’ advice to move on to Wyoming.

After a long journey, they end up in Big Pines, WY (which is mostly a general store and a couple of outbuildings). It’s a much warmer reception here; the other sodcutters want the other quarter claim homesteaded to reduce the fire danger. Even Mr. Douglas (David Janssen), the local rancher, grudgingly welcomes the newcomers. They ride out to their prospective claim, which encompasses a sheltered little valley where they decide to set up house.

And now, the other side of the foreclosure crisis…

Much footage of John plowing and planting and Maggie and the kids start a garden. Then John uses the non-daylight hours to make a sod house out of the plowings from the field; he plans to ride to Laramie to register their claim, but isn’t going to do it until there’s a roof over his family’s heads.

The sod house finished, John rides off, and everyone waits for his return in a week. Their prayers for rain are answered with a downpour (which also exposes all the weak spot in their sod roof), but it’s not the blessing they thought. The next day, Mr. Douglas the rancher rides up with one of his hands and a wrapped bundle. Apparently, John has camped in a washout, and got caught in a flashflood. The bundle is his body.

After burying her husband on their land, Maggie wants to take the children and go back to Indiana, but discovers that they’ve got only a couple of dollars left, and no one in the area can buy out her homestead in the spring, when everyone’s got their money invested in the season’s crop; she’ll have to wait until after the wheat harvest to have enough funds to pull up stakes.

“It was fun.”

Now, Nathan the Summarizer needs to take a back seat to Nathan the Analyzer for a few minutes. My natural story sense says that, really, this is the “inciting incident” of the plot, the point at which the protagonist needs to start acting for herself (as opposed to simply being the longsuffering baggage of her patriarchy-embodying husband). Or maybe one could interpret this as the end of the first act, at which point the story is finally set up for the next two acts. Problem is, this takes place at forty minutes into our running time, which is only seventy minutes. For those who are shaky with math, that means we’re already past the halfway mark. Time for the protagonist to step up and protag, right?

Wrong. Maggie does learn to shoot, yes, so she can hunt for meat, but mainly what she catches is Mr. Douglas’ attention, in that taciturn way for which Western cattlemen are known. Don’t worry, no one’s moving in on the fresh widow. Here’s as close as we get to impropriety: Maggie shoots one of Douglas’ longhorns that was in their (unfenced) wheat and had charged her children. Douglas and a cowhand ride up just then and he doesn’t get mad at her. Later, he has a hand deliver a haunch of beef from that cow to the Sergeant house. Racy, huh?

The biggest action we see in the second half is the prairie fire that threatens all the settlers’ grain just as it’s getting near harvest, as well as the cattleman’s grazing land. All of the menfolk of the area amass at the Sergeant homestead, it being the northernmost and therefore the logical place to plow a firebreak and set a backfire against the southern-sweeping fire, over Maggie’s objections. (The wind was apparently uncooperative during shooting, as the smoke from the supposedly south-racing fire is pretty obviously headed due east.) But Maggie dives in with the dozen men, plowing and then swatting out the spark-driven fires that jump the firebreak. Most of the Sergeant crop is saved. Yay.

With arms that thin, the recoil off that thing should break her shoulder.

In the end, despite Maggie’s insistence that she wants to go back to Indiana, she takes her children’s desires to stay in Wyoming into account, as well as the distant potential that she could maybe someday be in a position to possibly start something with Mr. Douglas, and decides — offscreen — to stay on their land. And when she comes out of the Big Pines general store where she’s sold off her crop and bumps into Mr. Douglas, she lets on that he’d be welcome at a roast beef dinner at the Sergeant place sometime. The end.

This kind of movie is usually labeled a “portrait” of the main character, because it sure as heck can’t be called a “story.” It seems like a half-hearted stab at presenting a feminist-friendly pioneer tale, but the result is ineffective both as a feminist tale and as a tale, period. As I have mentioned above, though not nearly as often as I should have, Maggie is only our protagonist by virtue of being our viewpoint character (and the subject of the title); if it weren’t for her incessant journal-writing, rendered in voiceover for the audience’s benefit, she’d be a nonentity in her own movie. I’ve seen pet rocks that are more proactive. In a backfire against the supposed feminist intent of the script, John seems more and more reasonable as the movie goes on (even after he dies); if he’s spent thirteen years with a woman who prefers to stare wistfully instead of make a decision, it’s no wonder that he’s gotten into the habit of taking charge.

Maggie’s not the only one who comes out an under-characterized cipher. The Sergeant children are undifferentiated luggage as well; I’ve waited all through this review for an occasion to slip in the fact that daughter Sarah is played by Helen Hunt in her first screen role, but the children are both such non-players in the story that it was never worth my while even to name them. Mr. Douglas only has personality imputed to him because we, as viewers well-educated in the tropes of the Western genre, know that ranchers and farmers were rarely buddy-buddy; other than that, he’s a stony-faced man of few words and fewer actions. I never thought I’d say this, but thank heaven for Shatner’s stagey histrionics, or nobody would have any personality on display!

“No, the nearest hot dogs are back in Nebraska.”

There are other problems with the script, too, mainly in the number of setups and payoffs which don’t match up. At the beginning, Maggie mentions more than once that she’s managed to bring her fine china out west, and one of the other settlers’ wives remarks on it when she comes to tea early on. Then nothing. If you were looking for a visual symbol of the “civilization” that Maggie left behind, this one seems ready-made. Similarly, when John and Maggie first lay eyes on their Wyoming claim, they make a big fuss over a handful of saplings in the valley that are the only trees for miles around. Wouldn’t it have made sense, then, to bury John under or near the saplings, or for Maggie to reference them as “John’s trees” in some sort of stirring speech (or, okay, voiceover) at the end?

I want to say that Pioneer Woman shows all the hallmarks of a first draft screenplay put into production too early, but I hesitate to draw that conclusion; I know enough about the workings of producers — the “I have money, therefore I know how to change the script!” kind — to admit the possibility that a cigar-chomper took a well-formed script and needlessly muddied it. Whichever path the script took before it went in front of the cameras, what ended up there wasn’t worth the effort. And worse, with John dying halfway through, the second half is 100% less Shatneriffic than the first.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1 (plus 1 miscarriage, and I don’t want to get into whether that counts)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • William Shatner, obviously