The first tip is the headline: “Murder in Yellowstone City” is not an ordinary thing for you. Instead, Richard Gray’s well-designed and exquisitely constructed indie film is as powerful a mystery as it is traditionally satisfying, with plenty to recommend it to fans of either genre who rarely get to experience such a mix. Indeed, outside of Henry Hathaway’s “Five Card Stud” (1968) and the woefully short-lived 2003 TV series “Peacemakers”, it’s hard to remember the many other scenarios suggesting that what might have resulted was that Zane Gray and Agatha Christie were excited about the bar. The ideas are exchanged.
Only gradually does it become clear that Thomas Jane’s Thaddeus Murphy is the detective of the piece, as his character – spurred on by Anna Camp as Alice, his wife and skilful partner – displays surprising morbid skills as he attempts to prove the innocence of a suspected killer. Surprise, because Thaddeus is presented as an idealistic clergyman who tends to his flock in the city of the same name with his missionary wife, and does not appear at first to be cut down in order to solve crimes. But that’s before he exhumes the body of a murder victim to discover exactly what kind of bullet was left in the body. And before he admitted to Alice that, in the bad old days, he’d do more direct shooting than bible bashing.
It’s 1881 in the Montana Territory, and Yellowstone City, a once-golden boom town, has gone through hard times. In recent times, it has primarily become a haven for people looking for something like an inclusive community because, in truth, they have nowhere else to go. Among the citizens: Edgar (Richard Dreyfus) and Mickey (John Alice), gay salon owners who pretend to be just good friends; Violet (Tanaya Betty), a young Lakota Sioux woman who survived a cavalry attack on her people, and now runs a local Kiswa stable; and Isabel (Amy Garcia), the Mexican supervisor of the saloon girls who also takes care of orphans and other needy people.
Then there’s Sheriff James Ambrose (Gabriel Byrne), a stern ex-soldier who isn’t given unreasonable brutality, but who feels completely (and justifiably) confident in his ability to keep the peace because of his fearsome reputation. Unfortunately, this situation leads him to immediately assume that when there is a murder in Yellowstone City, the newcomer must be responsible simply because he will be “the only man who doesn’t know what I’m going to do with it.” The beauty part of Byrne’s tightly controlled and fully committed performance is that, even as Ambrose’s determination to maintain law and order escalates into unwavering fanaticism, he ceases to become the film’s bad guy.
There is a promise that happy days will come again when a feisty prospector (Zach McGowan) drops a vein of gold in his near miss, and announces his intention to share his good fortune with his struggling neighbors. Unfortunately, the prospector is shot and killed while returning to the home of his long-suffering wife (Scotty Thompson). Sheriff Ambrose soon decided that the culprit must be the only newcomer in the area: a noble and well-spoken former slave who calls himself Cicero (Isaiah Mustafa) because “I grew up alone or with the wind. I go by the name I chose.” (Nice touch: when Cicero quotes Shakespeare to a jubilant Edgar, the parlor keeper clearly warned him against using cold to speak in front of other people, because, about these parts, people like to “understand what they are told.”)
Cicero ends up behind bars after some gold is suspiciously revealed to a prospector in his room. But Alice suspects his guilt after serving him in prison, and continues to advance his case to Thaddeus after Cicero issues an unauthorized release. (And if that sounds mysterious, well, it’s supposed to be. That’s a mystery, remember?) As the stranger does their best to avoid recapture, two more murders occur. Ambrose sees this as further evidence that his instincts were correct. However, Thaddeus tends to pick up a shovel and visit the cemetery.
Working from a first-rate text by Eric Bilgau, Gray plays an impartial role as he publishes clues until, around the two-thirds mark, lets us know who is responsible for the bloody actions. Even better, he and Bilgao go well with bringing the sting to death on screen by taking the time to encourage sympathy for two people who face violent targets in scenes so shocking that their murders seem so unfair.
The various shootouts and action scenes scattered throughout the final third of “Murder in Yellowstone” are impressively orchestrated, and best of all, believably. (You don’t often see the good guys show the presence of mind to rearm themselves with the weapons of enemies who have just been killed.) In the opinion of the filmmakers, there is no need to explain everything to us. All we need is a brief glimpse of Cicero’s horrific return to the scars to fully appreciate what has already survived. At one point, Edgar and Mickey—whose intimacy is never played for laughter, except when they were joking with each other—revealed that they adopted Violet more or less when they found her after the massacre. It’s a powerful spectacle, but emotions aren’t overly milked.
And we never find out what Thaddeus did, saw and learned in his past life to make him so adept at using firearms and projectiles, and why he “came to God because I was running from Satan.” Alice simply accepts that when push comes to shove, he can be a hero, and yes, a savior. So you can.
It should be noted that the spouses could continue to fruitfully solve the crime in a sequel or a TV series. After all, faith and forensics can move mountains.
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