National Post (National Edition)
A Western with a little bit of everything
Godless, the new sevenepisode Western miniseries from Netflix, comes at you hard. It opens with a striking, mostly silent fourminute tour of a town wiped out by an outlaw gang, scores of men and women lying in the streets where they fell.
It immediately follows that with a couple of staple Western scenes, the horse carrying a wounded rider into town and the doctor woken up to perform an anesthesia-free amputation.
But then Godless, written and directed by Scott Frank with Frank’s frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh as an executive producer, takes off in a different direction. It slows down and loosens up, turning almost pastoral. The violence recedes amid long, lyrical scenes of horse breaking and hunting.
Having set up a classic Shane or Rio Bravo scenario, with a town waiting for the arrival of desperados and forced to count on a seemingly cowardly sheriff and other unlikely heroes, Frank switches into a more contemporary, impressionistic mode before resolving the story in ways that won’t be spoiled here. Whichever kind of Western you’d like, he’s got it.
If he doesn’t achieve the visual or narrative poetry of the filmmakers he’s riffing on — the John Fords, Howard Hawkses and Robert Altmans — he still gives you plenty to look at, and it’s never boring. (Plenty in every sense — five of the seven episodes run well over an hour.)
Set in the New Mexico Territory, Godless has a simple premise. Jeff Daniels plays Frank Griffin, a legendarily brutal outlaw, and Jack O’Connell (Unbroken) plays Roy Goode, a protégé who double-crosses Griffin, shooting him in the arm and fleeing with the loot from a payroll heist.
The wounded Goode takes shelter with a tough widow, Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery), and reveals his gentle side, playing father to her half-Paiute son. Meanwhile Griffin and his gang track Goode, closing in on the inevitable showdown.
Frank’s major innovation, and Netflix’s big selling point for the series, is that Fletcher lives outside a mining town named La Belle populated almost entirely by women — nearly all the men were killed in an accident at the mine. It’s an arresting idea, but it doesn’t dominate the story the way you think it’s going to when you hear about it.
Frank appears more interested in the moral allegory mandated by the title, in which the frontier is a place of chaos where no god is looking out for anyone. (La Belle figures as a fatally flawed Eden.) Everyone has lost loved ones, not just to mine disasters and rampaging gangs but to flash floods, childbirth or appendicitis. Griffin is literally a biblical scourge, quoting Isaiah about the Western condition — “They have cast away the law of the Lord” — and Goode (get it?) is his counterpoint, the possibility of redemption.
Frank, working with cinematographer Steven Meizler (The Girlfriend Experience), captures the landscapes prettily if not particularly dramatically. Actors ride in and out of the looping story, some of whom you’re very happy to see, including Daniels, Scoot McNairy as the nearsighted sheriff of La Belle and, most happily, Sam Waterston as a weary U.S. marshal.