Gunslinging hero returns in Justified: City Primeval
Crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s US Marshal Raylan Givens is granted permission to inhabit another TV series. The results are stellar in Justified: City Primeval.
‘I just sit here, what am I going to do,” the great crime novelist Elmore Leonard said about his work. “I don’t have a trade; I don’t teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.”
His favourite, of the dozens he created, was US marshal Raylan Givens, a kind of gunslinger hero delivering frontier justice in a disturbing modern world. Always wearing a cowboy hat, as a lawman he’s seemingly on a quest to maintain his moral stance towards the many violent events in which he becomes enmeshed.
Regardless of the circumstances, Givens always attempts to resolve things peacefully, usually with a droll smile and a throwaway line. Leonard said he admired his creation for “The fact that he’s not shady, but there is some question about him. The way he disposes, for example, of moonshine. Things that he says about the laws. He’s not 100 per cent on the good side.”
Most of all, Givens considers his actions in the light of criminal activity as “justified”, especially when it comes to shooting the evil-doers and miscreants, displaying his mastery of the quick draw. In the tradition of the chivalrous knight errant, he saves this treatment for those who have gone bad.
Leonard, who died in 2013, introduced Givens as a supporting character in the 1993 novel Pronto, revived him two years later in Riding the Rap, and took him home to Kentucky in the 2001 novella Fire in the Hole, which was the initial basis of the long-running series Justified.
Developed by Graham Yost (The Americans), the Emmy-winning high-octane drama was developed for the US FX Network and ran for six seasons. The series is also based on Pronto and Riding the Rap and features Timothy Olyphant playing Givens with slick insouciance.
A one-time coalminer, Givens returns to Harlan County, the eastern Kentucky coal camp town, the hometown he’s tried to escape, as a deputy US marshal. Coming back, he carries with him an intense dislike of the corruption and crime running rampant through his town, a community exploited and ravaged by coal companies, drug dealers and moral disorder.
Olyphant’s Givens is a perfect Leonard protagonist in the brilliant, idiosyncratic series. “Timothy (Olyphant) is one of the few actors who delivers the lines the way I heard them when I wrote them,” Leonard said.
Justified’s storytelling cleverly works the messy complexities of both hero and villain, and how the line between crime and justice can easily blur before being resolved in increasingly anxious moments of violent action. Yost said the trick of the show, and its primary goal, had always been this mantra: “What Would Elmore Do?” He even handed his writers tags inscribed with the remark. “I have a picture of all of them and they’re at their desk and they all have a different book of mine and each one is reading to get my sound,” Leonard told CNN just before he died. “That’s very flattering, I’ll tell you.”
Now in some audacious storytelling, Raylan Givens is propelled into an Elmore Leonard story he wasn’t previously in, Justified: City Primeval. His character is further considered and developed at a different place in his life; spirits from the original series, as much as we miss them, are largely absent.
Givens is transported to the streets of Detroit, a town that once had 700 murders a year, in this new series where again, even though he’s a destroyer of criminals, he must find a way to maintain his own code of behaviour in the face of the limitations of Motortown’s social institutions. And do it at a time when scrutiny of cops has never been more intense, relentlessly demonised as insensitive and racist.
The eight-part series was created by Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, the former an executive producer on Justified and the latter an executive producer and director on the original. Jost was unavailable for the sequel as he had already committed to an Apple TV deal.
The new series, based on Leonard’s 1980 novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, in fact took a few years to get off the ground. The idea of adapting City Primeval had been around for some time, with Quentin Tarentino wanting to make it as a feature and then as a series, and Sam Peckinpah interested in developing the novel at one stage with a script by Leonard.
Access to the rights was complicated with MGM, which was behind the hugely successful Get Shorty, having some of the rights, and the Leonard estate also holding some but Andron and Dinner finally managed to wrangle their way to eventual production.
They both, like Yost before them, possess a well-learned respect for the distressing truth of crime stories and a well-honed understanding and deep appreciation of Leonard’s work. Dinner in fact directed the series premiere back in 2010 and directs the first episode of the new series with lovely kinetic energy.
“We had a great time for seven years on this show, and so the real intention was what if we did a long movie, a limited series, that’s not really trying to go back for the past with Justified, but to do a mashup between this book and this character that we loved, and not to revisit the past as much as we looked at this character as if he had three chapters in his life, and this is the second chapter,” says Dinner.
“We catapulted him into this story, and Dave and I like to say that the road in front of him is a lot shorter than the road behind. He’s at a state in his life where he is this walking anachronism, and can this guy survive in a world that’s not the same world that he’s used to? And the world’s changed politically, sociologically, and he’s changed as a man, and that’s where we find him.”
The show starts several years after the conclusion of Justified somewhere in the Everglades with Givens stopping to buy his daughter Willa, played by Olyphant’s real life daughter Vivian, an ice cream. They’re on their way to some kind of camp – she calls it “conversion therapy” – where Willa has been sent as punishment for punching another girl at school.
Somewhere on the highway, just as she asks if she can stay with her father, they are rear-ended by a pick-up truck and two guys determined in their cack-handed way to rob them, threatening Willa. Bad move. The attempt is short-lived, Givens pulling a shotgun from the boot of his car and shooting out their front tire before showing his badge.
At the same time, a man driving a convertible turns into a gas station, a few miles out of Detroit, pulling up behind a car with a dead deer strapped to the back. While the car’s owner is off paying, the man steals his car after cutting the animal loose.
He turns out later to be a killer called Clement Mansell, the self-styled “Man Who Would Be F..king King”, also known to police as “The Oklahoma Wildman”, played with a kind of nihilistic relish by Boyd Holbrook, who will become Given’s major adversary. He quickly joins his long-term partner Sandy Stanton (Adelaide Clemens) in crime at a casino where she is already setting up an Albanian high roller mark for another shake down.
And in a packed first episode, we are slowly, sometimes a little confusingly, introduced to Detroit’s mean streets, just as Givens is, though his journey is complicated by the presence of a rebellious 15-year-old daughter. They’re soon involved in a conspiracy involving the murder of a corrupt judge and his assistant, who is also a police informant, while Mansell continues his erratic crime spree.
There’s a comically violent detour involving the Wolverine Militia (“enough bomb-making paraphernalia for a small army”), a particularly vicious police dog, and a scary, dynamically filmed car chase scene. And the knucklehead cop (Norbert Leo Butz) who tells Givens “This is how we do it in Detroit” far too frequently.
Finally, and delightfully, there’s the enduring presence of a black defence attorney called Caroline Wilder, played with lovely witty presence by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who is no doubt going to create various problems in several ways for Givens as the shows carries on. A critic once said of Leonard that his world is “populated by cops who aren’t exactly good, crooks who aren’t exactly bad, and women who have an eye for the in-between.” Wilder is one of those.
It’s directed by Dinner with flair and energy, fitting in all the story elements without making it feel overly plot-driven, and maintaining a high level of visual storytelling with the fluid moving cameras of legendary cinematographer John Lindley. Together they heighten the visceral excitement of every scene, often inventively using drone shots for unusual angles and one-shot set-ups, expert at cinematic tease and pay-off. Welcome back, Givens.
Justified: City Primeval, streaming on Disney+. Justified, all seasons streaming on Stan.
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