‘Godless’ aims for greatness
‘Godless’ enchants with expert plot, web of characters
“Godless”
opens on a scene of unspeakable devastation.
In 1880s New Mexico, a marshal (Sam Waterston, “Law & Order”) rides into a town. The railroad train has been derailed. Bodies are strewn everywhere, but most of the victims were shot.
A telegraph operator appears to have died in the midst of sending a message. His telegraph clicks away angrily.
The body of a small boy hangs in the wind. Someone has decimated the town, leaving but one survivor, a woman who sings over a corpse.
She’s not insane, but the trauma she endured would be enough to unhinge anyone.
Elsewhere, just outside of La Belle, N.M., Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery, “Downton Abbey,” “Good Behavior”) fires a gun at a stranger on her property. Turns out she wasn’t the first person to wound the man, Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell, “Unbroken”).
Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels, “The Newsroom”) and his legion of men wake up a physician. Frank’s arm has been practically torn apart by gunfire. The surgeon reluctantly tells him that the arm will have to be amputated. Frank is rather casual about the diagnosis.
“I’ve seen my death. This ain’t it,” Frank says.
In La Belle, the women struggle to protect their own turf. A mining disaster a couple years earlier wiped out just about every adult male. Sheriff Bill McNue (Scoot McNairy) is derided as a coward. His sister Mary Agnes (Merritt Wever, “Nurse Jackie,” “The Walking Dead”) shocks him by wearing men’s clothes. She seems to have more sense than the entire town combined. Everyone is on a collision course that can only end in bloodshed. Frank just happens to be a Biblespouting sociopath.
After the surgeon successfully operates on him, Frank tells him, “I hope I can do the same for you some time.” Is that an expression of gratitude or a threat?
Daniels has never been more terrifying on screen. He rides into a church service and threatens to level that community to dust if they don’t help him.
“The same God that made you and me made the rattlesnake. That just makes no sense,” he later tells another victim.
Dockery is turning into one of the most fascinating actresses on television. She was the heroine on “Downton Abbey,” but her acting choices often made her like a villain. (Her treatment of sister Edith was repugnant.) She easily segued to the complicated antihero of “Good Behavior,” and here she plays a twotime widow with a scorecard of reasons not to trust anyone and desperate and smart enough to know she must trust someone. She’s immensely watchable.
As the seven-episode series from Scott Frank and Academy Award-winner Steven Soderbergh unfolds, just about everyone is leading complicated lives. Bill mourns for his wife and resents his toddler daughter, believing her birth robbed him of the woman he loved. Yet he remains fiercely determined to protect a town that resents him.
“I’ve been known to kill a man or two.” he says to his sister.
“So’s lightning,” Mary Agnes replies. “Godless” might remind you of HBO’s still lamented “Deadwood” in its expert plotting. Those dusty winds swirl around bloody secrets.