This real-life tale of an enslaved man turned US marshal is a tense, thoughtful interrogation of what liberty means. Dennis Quaid and David Oyewolo put in wonderful performances
here is a challenge, amounting virtually to a moral responsibility, when making a drama set in the time of the American enslavement of Black people. That is: to find a way of bringing home its fundamental horror to an audience now long accustomed to depictions of it., finds it in a scene set round a card table. Bass and his enslaver, George Reeves , are playing for his freedom.
But Lawmen is a drama designed to interrogate at every turn what liberty means for colonised or enslaved people. Bass lives there peacefully for a few years, picking up the language and working occasionally as a translator between storekeepers and visitors to the local trading post. There he meets a former soldier, now a prisoner, from his Confederate days and learns that the Union won – that emancipation has formally arrived.
It is the beginning of what became Bass’s life’s work. In 1875, he was made a deputy chief marshal for western Arkansas by a judge, Isaac Parker , and served for more than 30 years, arresting at least 3,000 people. One of them was his son, who was charged with murder. The western is such a storied form that there are many familiar tropes. Bass escapes hounds by swimming across a river; endless grizzled men squint at the sun. At times, it threatens to tip Lawmen into humourless pastiche – particularly given that the script generally hews to a terse tradition . But the rare point of view and the care taken with the story, to say nothing of its basis in real-life achievements, save it.
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