Piccadilly Cowboy—known alternately as “Anxiously Engaged”—is the first-time effort of newcomer writer/director Tyler Ford, a Utah native who reportedly was working as a user-car salesman when convinced by a local film professor (buying a car) to take a film class—leading him to a degree from the London Film School and, hopefully, a productive film career inside or outside of LDS cinema.

It’s not clear that Piccadilly Cowboy really had much of a release in theaters, even by modest LDS film standards, and—coincidently or not—it seems to have a ‘direct-to-DVD’ feel to it anyway. That may not sound like a compliment, but in reality most LDS films released to date have been, essentially, direct-to-DVD-quality films anyway, and PC deserves some credit for being somewhat low-key and low-ambition--not trying to be something it’s not. 

Set entirely in London--with a brief excursion to the countryside of Scotland--Ford makes good use of a foreign locale (to Utahns) in terms of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘flavor’, using primarily British (and non-LDS) actors. (No fake accents as far as I could determine)

The plot centers around a real American cowboy (boots, hat, belt buckle and all) named Carson who’s working for an English beef company, and hoping to marry a local girl named Lucy.  Complications arise when Lucy’s grandfather tells Carson Lucy can’t possibly get married when her older sister Jema is still single…therefore Carson needs to find someone for Jema to marry before his own wedding will be ‘approved’. (Shades of the Genesis story of Isaac, Leah, and Rachel…only in this case without the option of Carson just marrying both girls.) 

Okay, sure, you can probably guess how it’s all going to turn out in the end.  To his credit, Ford as director handles things pretty well—where we know where the story is going, but 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--not necessarily a flaw in my book…your mileage may vary.)   Carson doesn’t have a wise-cracking friend who’s always tagging along to throw out pithy one-liners, for example, but rather an older and wiser co-worker who offers sensible advice instead of sarcastic quips.  Ford also downplays the potential ‘fish-out-of-water’ scenarios featuring an outspoken American clashing with the more buttoned-down British culture, with Carson—cowboy hat and all—more or less fitting in from the beginning.  

The writing in general is above-average for LDS films—at least from the direct-to-DVD perspective that I believe PC essentially is.  The dialogue isn’t brilliant, but sounds like real people talking to each other—a basic characteristic that other LDS films often struggle to achieve.

Having said that, there are a few issues that tend to drag the film down a few notches.  A brief look at these:

Focus:  PC’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 wastes a lot of time getting from the setup to the (more or less obvious) conclusion.  

The biggest problem is a subplot involving corporate embezzlement within Carson’s company which adds nothing to the movie, and 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, is pretty pointless.)

Even at the end of the movie, when the grand finale featuring our hero running to the train station to meet and confess his love for his one true soul mate has already been carefully setup, 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 you knew it was going in the first place much 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 kind of 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 within the movie that Carson’s Church activity (nor his quasi-missionary work) suffers from any issues of doubt. 

This is a missed opportunity—not only because this unresolved subplot ends up being 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 actually meet). 

Mormon stuff: PC 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.  Strangely, though, the Church stuff seems grafted on just to *be* LDS content rather than having an important place in the plot.  For all the LDS terminology, scriptures, and music bandied about throughout the film, all of it seems…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 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, there is much to recommend and in the end PC—in the vein of its direct-to-video ambitions—is clearly worth at least a rental…

Final Grade: B-