Emily Blunt Seeks Justice in the Transifixing Western Tragedy The English: Review
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The Pitch: 1890, High Plains Kansas; a ramshackle hotel in the middle of nowhere. That’s where two souls, born in different worlds but bound by shared purpose, meet at the wrong end of a knife. One is Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), an English noblewoman on a mission to find the man who killed her son; the other, a Pawnee and former US Army scout named Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), beaten and strung up by the owner (Ciaran Hinds) for the crime of Ordering a Drink While Native.
Through a mixture of providence, Locke’s resolve, and Whipp’s skills as a fighter, they escape their joint crisis. But that’s only the beginning of their journey together, which will see them traverse hundreds of miles, contending with dangerous new threats in the present and the evils of their past. America, the real America, is a wasteland carved up by beasts, and the only way these two can pass through it with their souls intact is together.
Out There, Back Then: There’s something magical and perplexing about Hugo Blick’s six-part miniseries for Prime Video, tangible as a smell in the air but impossible to get your fingers on.
Blick is something of a TV auteur in the UK, crafting well-received miniseries that are little regarded in the States (The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising). Fitting, then, that his latest is a deconstruction of the Western from the continent that settled the West in the first place, one as intellectual as it is romantic and thrilling — though it’ll take a couple of watches to get on its wavelength.
Blick’s approach sits in an enticing middle ground between the spaghetti Western (complete with colorful characters and a barn-burner of a score by Federico Jusid, all Ennio Morricone-esque sweep and romance), the acid Westerns of the 1970s, and the latest crop of anti-Westerns coming from folks like Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) and Paul Greengrass (News of the World). Here, the West isn’t a land of possibility but a rapidly-drying purgatory filled with people desperate to carve out their place. The wealthy come here to escape their pampered lives and siphon the New World’s riches; everyone else struggles merely to stay alive, whether Native or not.
Cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer soaks in the vast plains and cloud-filled skies of the Old West in one fisheye-lensed wide after another, the azure skies bouncing off orange-and-brown dust in ways that’ll make your eyes pop. The West is a place of great majesty, littered with fragments of horror: a flattened bird skeleton here, a human skull wedged between a small rock face there.
The English (Prime Video)
Colomer and Blick relish in the theatricality of gesture, letting performers hold arch, Expressionistic postures as they lean on a cane or point a weapon. There’s something of the visual pop of anime here, especially as certain characters’ outfits grow more outlandish (including Rafe Spall’s Cockney villain) by the end.
Freedom Ain’t Pretty: Like its unlikely protagonists, The English has a lot of thematic ground to cover, and it doesn’t always go about it in the most straightforward way. In its opening minutes, we hear Blunt’s Locke speak wistfully of her time in America, of what we’d soon learn is her experience with Whipp: “I wanted to kill a man for the murder of my child. You wanted your land back, stolen from you.”
From there, we work our way backwards, a long and winding road through episodic detours and convoluted subplots that can be hard to keep straight unless you’re keeping notes. There are English dandies building cattle empires, widows looking for their lost herds, a new town built on piles of Native bodies, and various bands of brigands and roustabouts who serve mostly as cannon fodder for our desperate leads.
It’s often quite thrilling in the moment, but Blick’s circuitous path through Locke and Whipp’s world can often leave you lost. The speechifying doesn’t help, most every character speaking in packed, portentous monologue — enough to make you think Mike Flanagan did some last-minute touchups on the script.
Blick’s clearly aiming to Say Something about the consumptive nature of Western expansion, ironically viewing the savagery of Manifest Destiny from the lens of a people who well know the violence of colonization. But he overstates it at times, seemingly to stretch out his six-episode mandate to sufficient length. All of the varying threads don’t really coalesce till midway through Episode 5, at which point the show snowballs toward a very satisfying end. It’s a miniseries that practically requires a rewatch.
What You Want and What You Need: And yet, what binds the murky sludge of The English‘s pacing together is the dual miracle of Blunt and Spencer, the glue holding Blick’s apocalyptic vision of the West in place. In their hands, The English turns into something of a romantic tragedy — a love story that was doomed before the two even met.
The English (Prime Video)
Blunt, as both star and executive producer, has a delicate tightrope to walk: Locke is a woman both flabbergasted at the violence of America (“It can’t be that this country is only filled with killers and thieves!”) and an intensely resourceful woman of the plains who’s good with a gun — often in the same episode. She’s fantastic here, holding the screen like any grande dame of the Old West could hope for.
But wow, what a showcase for Spencer, a Native actor who’s worked steadily for years (The Twilight films, Banshee) yet never gotten the kind of exposure he needed until now. Whereas everyone around him talks and talks, Spencer’s Eli can communicate volumes with a single word.
There’s a dignified resolve in his work here, the lines of his face telling the story of a man torn between his loyalty to his people and the compromises he made in working for the US Army during a time of Native genocide. “I’ve seen hell, and I’ve made hell,” Whipp intones to Locke early on, with the kind of cowboy stoicism that would put John Wayne to shame. It’s truly incredible to watch him work here, and one can only hope this is the first of many lead roles for him.
The Verdict: Flaws and all, The English is impossible to look away from. It’s a bold, epic take on the Western, drawing from a half-dozen different cinematic modes and smashing them together until the pieces fit. Sometimes, they’re glued together with some incredible performances, a show-stopping score, and the Expressionistic craft with which it’s made.
It’s that dissonance that, ironically, makes the show that much more enticing to watch. You’re seeing the decay and rot of a country in slow motion, a deterioration that seeps through even into the characters you love the most. Blick forces you to stare into that majesty and terror with both eyes open — even if he has to cut your eyelids out to make you see.
Where’s It Playing? The English walks through the saloon doors of Prime Video November 11th.
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Emily Blunt Seeks Justice in the Transifixing Western Tragedy The English: Review
Clint Worthington
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