A brilliant corrective to the Western genre
Miniseries offers a scathing judgement on ways in which three decades of American history have been used to sustain a 130-year-old myth
Do not be fooled by M-Net’s description of the new western miniseries The English as an action revenge miniseries. Creator Hugo Blick’s period piece while certainly driven by revenge and including some nail-biting memorably tense action is much more than a nostalgic old-school genre crowd pleaser.
Rather it is perhaps the most quietly but emphatically radical re-evaluation of the myths on which the western has sustained itself since it first emerged as one of the first recognisable and American-created genres in the earliest days of the motion picture.
Blick who began his career as an actor — most famously playing the young Jack Napier in Tim Burton’s Batman who gave us the immortal line “have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? ”— has over the course of the past decade carved a place for himself as one of television’s most singular and intelligent creators.
His previous shows, most notably The Shadow Line (2011), The Honourable Woman (2014) and Black Earth Rising (2017) have all demonstrated his particular ability to subvert genre tropes in service of examining the long shadows that violently traumatic events from the past cast down the generations into the future and The English is no exception to this. It is, however, perhaps Blick’s most satisfyingly crafted and executed demonstration of this theme — filled with awesomely eerie and foreboding landscapes, memorably eccentric and dangerously untrustworthy characters and well-placed gruesome violence that all work towards making it the most provocative “revisionist western” in recent memory.
Like much of Blick’s work it is powered by revenge but while that motivation may strike you at first glance as personal it soon becomes clear that it’s historical and that the violent tragedy on which the journeys of the characters — and a whole town — is built is one that the show is bent on avenging. That broader revenge theme is also one that is cast through the eyes and concerns of present-day viewers and offers a scathing judgment on the ways in which three decades of American history have been used to sustain a 130-yearold myth that is wilfully constructed on the back of a lie.
The story concerns two very different loners brought together by chance and initially the convenience of each other to fulfilling their own quests for restitution. Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) is a stubborn, fiercely independent upper-class Englishwoman who has left her comfortable life of privilege behind her to enact her revenge on the man she holds responsible for the death of her son.
Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), who now runs a small empire in the barren lands of the frontier, is a Pawnee native who carries with him the guilt of betrayal of his people after years of service as a scout for the US army cavalry and who has left the army and is looking to claim a parcel of land in Nebraska, promised to all former servicemen — even if his white colleagues tell him that army or no army, the government will never give a Native American land.
When both the insouciant Englishwoman and the grimly silent Pawnee find themselves imperilled by the nefarious machinations of an oily Kansas hotelier (Ciarán Hinds) they are thrown together in a battle for survival and soon realise that perhaps it would be mutually beneficial to have each other along for part of their respective journeys.
As the pair progress and find themselves in a grim series of encounters with a cast of eccentric characters, they come to see the harsh realities hidden behind the meritocratic foundational myth of the West. They realise that they are inadvertently joined by more than circumstance and that a reckoning with a tragedy from their past will be inevitable and perhaps fatal.
Across the foreboding, wide-open plains in front of them lies their nemesis, the villainous, psychotic, cockney-Londoner reinvented as American frontier gangster entrepreneur, David Melmont (Rafe Spall in a career-defining evil performance). And so we watch captivated as our unlikely pair of star-struck lovers gallop ever more determinedly towards their meeting with destiny, Lucifer and the nastily bloody truths of American history.
On many surface levels this is a western as we know it and one that knows and pays homage to those who have come before it: there is Anthony Mann’s sparse dialogue and stripped down symbolic black-and whiteheroism; the mostly silent determination of Whipp’s revenge-driven hero, which echoes Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven; and the musical character-counterpoints and close-ups of weathered faces from the arsenal of spaghetti master Sergio Leone.
But in all other ways, some obvious and many not so apparent, Blick’s taut-plotting, Pinteresque-script in which what is not said is more significant than what is and his important but commonsense decision to cast an actual Native American in a heroic role in partnership with a single-minded woman — are quietly revelatory and revolutionary choices.
They are all ultimately, the singular ingredients for what assuredly results in the bitter and grimly absurd good medicinal concoction that the bad, old western has needed for decades.
Watch it as a bloody, action period drama and it will deliver. But consider it as a righteously political and creative corrective to the injustices of American and more broadly colonial mythmaking and the rewards are exponential.
‘The English’ screens weekly on Thursdays at 9pm on M-Net — Dstv Channel 101.