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With prestige borrowed over from the combination of novelist Larry McMurtry, producer Suzanne de Passe, and star Anjelica Huston, Buffalo Girls perhaps had too much baggage to ever truly be great. But it could have turned out better than this middling effort.
Buffalo Girls tells the sprawling story of Calamity Jane, a highly fictionalized account that seems more concerned with crafting whimsy and sentimentality than being authentic to these people. It also tries to slam together as many figures from the closing era as possible without bothering to develop any of them much. You get quick appearances from Wild Bill Hickok (Sam Elliott), Buffalo Bill (Peter Coyote), Sitting Bull (Russell Means), Annie Oakley (Reba McEntire), General Custer (John Diehl) played by a series of variously distracting guest stars.
But the main thrust of the story involves Jane writing down her life story for the daughter she had with Hickok and gave up. Speaking to us through narration as though we were the daughter, Buffalo Girls spends most of its time developing the friendship between Jane and saloon owner Dora DuFran (Melanie Griffith). If you arched your eyebrow and wondered if there was any kind of Sapphic undertones to their relationship, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But like so much involved in this mini-series, that particular element goes woefully under-explored. Jane’s gender performance also goes under-explored – we rarely see her done-up in feminine styles of the time, preferring to express herself in as masculine a way as possible.
Also damning Buffalo Girls to being merely serviceable is that the entire thing feels inauthentic to these characters. The world feels too pristine, the characters feel like outlandish figures instead of fully-realized people, dialog can be awkward at times, and a strong streak of sentimentality permeates throughout. I wouldn’t doubt that Calamity Jane would have really had moments of wistful longing for the old days and friends who died, and a touch of sentimentality when earned has never bothered me. Buffalo Girls though gets swept away by the sentimentality and artifice, losing the characters along the way.
Yet throughout there is Anjelica Huston trying valiantly to make magic happen, and she nearly succeeds on sheer effort alone. She gives her Calamity Jane a grit and fiery edge, crafting a woman who presents herself in as masculine a way as possible in order to even be seen as their equal. Melanie Griffith’s saloon owner is a hit-and-miss affair, like practically all of Griffith’s work. Sometimes she’s effective and other times too distractingly surgically made-over to make her character look authentic and winsome in her emotions. Jack Palance, Tracey Walter, Liev Schreiber, and the various parade of guest stars are under-utilized. While the various one-or-two scene cameos from Annie Oakley and General Custer are attempts at a wider canvas, they’re more distracting than anything. Never bothering to craft real people when blown-up cartoon versions of the characters will do, at least they cast them successfully to type while their scenes sometimes swing too wide instead of hitting it home.
