Pullman stars in updated Western ‘The Ballad of Lefty Brown’

It’s not about the alpha-male cowboy hero, tracking down outlaws and shooting them up, he said.

He added that he had friends in the audience he’d known for 40 years, since he first came out West for a summer acting gig with Montana Shakespeare in the Parks.

Pullman and Jared Moshe, the film’s writer and director, answered audience questions Thursday night after a showing sponsored by the Bozeman Film Society, Montana Film Festival and Montana Film Office.

Set in 1889 Montana territory, on the cusp of statehood, the movie was filmed in historic Bannack, around Virginia City, Dillon and Ennis, and on a ranch near where the Pullman family has run cattle in the Whitehall area for 26 years.

Pullman, 64, known for playing the president in the “Independence Day” movies and the jilted fiancé in “Sleepless in Seattle,” joked, “I think all my neighbors thought I was such a jefe that I could call this movie up 20 minutes from my house.”

Pullman plays Lefty Brown, an illiterate but loyal sidekick to the handsome, heroic Edward, played by Peter Fonda, who’s gunned down on the eve of becoming the state’s senator.

In his shambling, Gabby Hayes way, Lefty wants to do what’s right, to track down the outlaws who killed his longtime partner and friend. Yet nobody, not Edward’s tough-as-rattlesnakes widow, not even Lefty himself, is sure that the grizzled cowhand is up to the challenge.

Montana itself — its sagebrush landscape and big sunset skies — provides the film’s beautiful setting. Moshe said it was really because of the persistence of the Montana Film Commission that it was filmed here, rather than New Mexico or Calgary.

“I fell in love with Bannack,” Moshe said. Then they found the Jackson ranch, with its “amazing” original homestead still standing.

Moshe said he has been inspired by old classic Westerns. “John Ford hated civilization,” he said, “but he loved community.”

The audience applauded the film warmly. Jenni Lowe Anker said as a fourth-generation Montana, whose great-grandfather settled in Bannack, she congratulated the filmmakers on “a fabulous movie, fabulous acting job.”

Some audience members liked best the scenes with Kathy Baker playing the widow. Moshe said her character was based on Mary Ann, wife of the legendary Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, a woman who had to survive alone in a man’s world.

Both filmmakers had family members in the film. Pullman’s son played a cowhand who put a noose around Lefty’s neck and beat him in a deleted scene. Moshe’s baby son, wailing in a crowd scene, didn’t end up on the cutting room floor.

“They accepted us,” he said, even though “we were weird people — actors.”

Pullman grew up on a dairy farm in rural New York and feels an affinity for country people. He said his Whitehall neighbors might be the last generation untouched by pop culture and media.

“I’ve never heard the word ‘awesome’ come out of their mouths,” he said.

“It breaks my heart,” Pullman said, that so many city people feels rural folks are antagonists. His character Lefty is, he said, “disparaged as too dumb, he can’t handle it,” and so to make him a central character makes this “a good story for these times.”

“Maybe,” Moshe said, “there will be a ‘Lefty Rides Again.’”

The film is available by online streaming and will be released on DVD in mid-February.

Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 79 and 57 percent rating. The Los Angeles Times’ film critic Kenneth Turan called it a “satisfying independent Western … a dark and brooding film … made with both a modern touch and real love for the genre.”