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)
