Piccadilly Cowboy — alternately titled Anxiously Engaged — is the first-time effort of writer/director Tyler Ford. Ford, a Utah native with a degree from the London Film School, hopefully has a productive film career inside or outside of LDS cinema ahead of him. Piccadilly Cowboy has its shortcomings, naturally, but is a decent film, and should be a good start to that career.
It’s not clear that Piccadilly Cowboy really had much of a release in theaters and — coincidently or not — seems to have a ‘direct-to-DVD’ feel to it anyway. That’s not meant to be an insult; in reality, most LDS films released to date have been essentially direct-to-DVD-quality films anyway, and the low-key Cowboy deserves credit for not trying to be something it’s not.
Set entirely in London — with a brief excursion to Scotland — the plot centers around Carson, an American cowboy (boots, hat, belt buckle and all) who’s now working in England for a beef company. He hopes to marry his girlfriend, a local girl named Lucy, but complications arise when Lucy’s grandfather tells Carson she can’t possibly get married when her older sister Jema is still single. Therefore, Carson is tasked with finding someone for Jema to marry before his own marriage will be approved. (Shades of the Genesis story of Isaac, Leah, and Rachel…presumably without the same option of Carson just marrying both girls.)
Okay, you can probably guess how it’s going to turn out in the end, but Ford’s direction is good enough to overcome the familiarity of the plot. Piccadilly Cowboy is predictable, but pleasant: we know where the story is going, but we kind of enjoy the ride anyway.
Ford keeps the tone of Piccadilly Cowboy grounded, without trying to stretch comedic elements too far in search of a laugh. (There are, in fact, very few ‘laughs’ in PC at all — although your mileage may vary) Carson doesn’t have a wise-cracking friend who’s always throwing out pithy one-liners and sarcastic quips, for example, but rather an older and wiser co-worker who offers sensible advice and genuine support. Ford also downplays the potential ‘fish-out-of-water’ scenarios featuring an outspoken American clashing with the more buttoned-down British culture. Carson — cowboy hat and all — more or less fits in with everyone from the beginning. Ford makes good use of a foreign locale (to Utahns) in terms of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘flavor’, using primarily British (and non-LDS) actors with no obvious fake accents.
The writing in general is above-average for LDS films — at least from the direct-to-DVD perspective that I believe Piccadilly Cowboy essentially is. The dialogue isn’t necessarily brilliant, but succeeds in sounding like real people talking to each other — a basic characteristic that other LDS films often struggle to achieve.
Piccadilly Cowboy is a decent film, although there are a few issues that tend to drag the film down a few notches. A brief look at these:
Focus: Cowboy’s biggest problem is focus and pacing. For a premise that’s basically a romance-slash-relationship picture between Carson, Lucy, and Jema, the script unfortunately takes a LOT of time getting from the setup to the (more or less obvious) conclusion.
The biggest offender is a subplot involving corporate embezzlement within Carson’s company which adds nothing to the movie, and in fact takes away time we should be spending together with our three leads. (This subplot sends Carson on an irrelevant ten minute tangent to Scotland in the middle of the movie, which other than a chance to see the Scottish countryside, means nothing in the end.)
Even at the end of the movie, when the grand finale has already been set up featuring our hero making his (cliched) run to the train station to confess his love for his one true soul mate before she leaves forever, there’s yet another ten minute tangent (with Carson winding up in prison, of all places) before it’s allowed to finally happen. Being predictable in terms of plot is forgivable; being predictable, and then dragging things out for an interminable amount of time to get to where we knew it was going in the first place less so.
Our “Hero”: Carson has a basic problem — he’s not really a nice guy. Not just ‘untactful’ in a blunt American kind of way, but often rude and insensitive to both Jema and (oddly) Lucy, too. While not to the extent that it makes the audience not want to root for him at all, the screenplay would probably be stronger if we had a main male character where we could better understand why two girls might want to marry him…or at least where he receives some sort of ‘comeuppance’ at the end where he learns his lesson and vows to be better.
Carson’s family problems, revealed out of the blue and then completely dropped by the end of the movie, form another subplot that sucks away valuable screen time without any payoff. Carson mentions that his parents’ divorce caused him to “question everything he has ever been taught [in the Church]“, although there’s no evidence elsewhere within the movie that Carson’s spirituality or church activity has suffered from any issues of doubt.
This is a missed opportunity: not only because this unresolved subplot is another screen-time waster, but because it had the potential to be integrated into Carson’s personality and his relationships with Lucy and Jema, but wasn’t. Usually — from my experience with people with divorced parents — one common consequence is that they are far more hesitant to commit to marriage themselves, since the possibility —and pain — of divorce is fresh in their minds. Carson — almost to an unrealistic extent — shows no such hesitation to get married to either of two girls he has basically just met, nor is there any obvious effect on his personal relationships other than with his parents (whom we never meet).
Mormon stuff: Piccadilly Cowboy is a without-a-doubt Mormon movie with all three main characters being active LDS. It’s understandable why Ford — LDS himself — would deliberately include obvious LDS content given the target audience of the film (and the general “write what you know” axiom). Strangely, though, the Church stuff seems grafted on just to *be* Church stuff rather than having an important place in the plot. For all the LDS scriptures, music, and terminology thrown about throughout the film, it’s all tangential to our main characters’ philosophies in life, and in their search for love. Make all three main characters Catholic, agnostic, or Buddhist, for example, and really nothing about our three main characters and how they relate to each other in the movie would change. Not a fatal problem, but it’s perhaps regrettable that for all the time spent on LDS things Ford couldn’t have found a way to make it all more integral to the plot and the characters.
The end result is that Piccadilly Cowboy is still a pleasant experience, but for a movie that’s only 100 minutes long, it feels much longer. Some fundamental reevaluation of which plot threads were invaluable to the story and which were not would most likely have created a stronger, more efficiently-paced picture. Still, Piccadilly Cowboy — in the vein of its direct-to-video ambitions — is worth a rental.
Final Grade: B-
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