A spaghetti western? Well, the plot’s certainly tangled
The English BBC2, Thursday ★★★★★ The Crown
Netflix ★★★★★
There is so much that is fantastic about The English, Hugo Blick’s latest drama for the BBC. Emily Blunt stars, so that’s fantastic. It’s a western and the widescreen cinematography is fantastic. The
Ennio Morricone-inspired music on the soundtrack, also fantastic. The Tarantino-esque levels of violence – there is a brutal killing every two minutes, I swear – is less fantastic, to my mind, but that’s not why this achieves a middling three-star rating. As with Blick’s other dramas (The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising), I just couldn’t seem to follow it.
It’s playing weekly but has also been made available as a box set, and I pressed on, hoping it would make sense. But after three episodes (of six), I was more lost than any of the characters who thought they were heading for Wyoming but were galloping in the wrong direction entirely. Who’s that? What did they say? The old fella smashing buffalo skulls to make bone meal, what’s his game? What about his wife? Who are the Germans? I concentrated. I paused and rewound to rewatch certain scenes. I made sure I caught every line of dialogue even if it meant rewinding 28 times.
The thrust of it was always clear – it’s a retribution story as well as a love story – but so many characters’ motivations weren’t. And if it had something to say – about colonialism, about ‘the English’, about the rot at the heart of the American empire – it could not say it coherently.
It opens in 1890 with Lady Cornelia Locke (Blunt) arriving in America to seek revenge for the death of her son and pitching up at a remote hotel. Actually, no, it doesn’t open with that. It opens with US Cavalry officers shooting an Indian, Running Hawk, and blowing his face clean off. What this has to do with anything else, I still don’t know.
Back to Cornelia, who pitches up at this remote hotel amid the arid landscape, stepping out of her carriage in a blancmangepink dress (stunning cinematography, like I said). She is greeted by the hotel manager, Mr Watts (Ciarán Hinds), who is in the process of torturing an Indian. This is Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a veteran of the US Army’s Pawnee Scouts, who is heading north to claim some land for himself and who had the temerity to enter the hotel and request a drink at the bar. Yes, he said ‘please’ but, says Watts, ‘it’s not his manners, it’s his colour’.
She offers money for Whipp to be released, but Hinds has something else in mind. A terrifying dinner ensues. She knows he plans to rape and kill her. We know Whipp will be along to save her, because this is a western, after all, and tropes are tropes, even when it’s Blick. The two travel together. Sometimes he saves her, and sometimes she saves him.
There are some magnificently tense moments and some magnificently choreoand graphed stand-offs, with fingers twitching over triggers. Life here is so pitifully short that even actors of the calibre of Toby Jones don’t hang around for long. Stephen Rea turns up, as do Rafe Spall and Nichola McAuliffe, but there’s always something happening over here, something else happening over there, and yet another thing happening God knows where, and it’s a muddle.
It is gorgeous to look at, and both Blunt Spencer are superbly charismatic. But ultimately it’s a mess. I know some will say it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the plot completely. It’s what they always say about Doctor Who. To which I can only say, in capitals: ‘IT DOES MATTER TO ME!’
The fifth series of The Crown has attracted a great deal of controversy, particularly on the grounds that it presents fiction as fact. Dame Judi Dench has called it ‘crude sensationalism’ and ‘cruelly unjust’. Sir John Major has said it’s ‘malicious nonsense’, although if I were John Major, and Jonny Lee Miller had been cast to play me, I may have chosen not to make any fuss, if you get my drift.
What you probably weren’t braced for is just how dull this season is. An entire episode on Prince Philip and his passion for carriagedriving? Has anyone ever been interested in carriage-driving, apart from Prince Philip? That said, I wouldn’t have minded borrowing his whip, as I often felt like cracking one to speed this up. Get a move on. Enough with the carriages, already. And do we really need Mohamed Al Fayed’s full life story?
The new casting isn’t entirely successful. Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, that works. In fact, Debicki is excellent, even if her Diana is always Diana at her most sadeyed. But Imelda Staunton’s Queen seemed rather lifeless, while Dominic West is plainly too hot for Prince Charles. Their accents weren’t consistent either. I clocked many an ‘off’ that wasn’t an ‘orf’.
Also, it is sometimes fictionalised in the Royals’ favour. Would Prince Andrew ever have had the self-awareness to say that his then wife, Sarah, had been forced into bad behaviour (the toe-sucking, John Bryan, etc) by the family’s inability to accept her? That it was all their fault and not hers? That seemed very, very, very unlikely. But I could always understand what was happening. And I was grateful for that.