Sophia Michaels
In the final days of 2014, my wife and I both came down with a nasty case of the flu. Unable to do much but alternately shiver and sweat in bed together, we attempted to distract ourselves with a miniseries I had heard good things about earlier in the year: The Honourable Woman. Written and directed by Hugo Blick, the thriller starred Maggie Gyllenhaal as an Anglo-Jewish businesswoman caught up in a web of intrigue that involved, among other things, a kidnapping, Israeli intelligence officers, and, I think, fiber optic cables? To be honest, while we loved Gyllenhaal’s performance, along with the sense of mounting tension and the visual style, we had a lot of trouble following the plot, frequently pausing episodes to ask each other exactly what was happening. We just couldn’t tell if this was a side effect of our temporary delirium, or a flaw in Blick’s storytelling.
I never got around to Blick’s follow-up, Black Earth Rising, starring a pre-I May Destroy You Micaela Coel as a Rwandan-born law investigator living in London who gets caught up in a case tied to the Rwandan Genocide. So the premiere of his latest show, the Emily Blunt vehicle The English, provided a chance to see whether I could track a Blick narrative if the room wasn’t spinning as I watched.
The experience of watching The English while healthy, though, proved roughly the same as bingeing The Honourable Woman from a sick bed. Blunt is fantastic, as are many of her co-stars. The whole thing looks gorgeous, and it has some thoughtful variations on Blick’s pet theme about what happens when people from one culture get mixed up in the affairs of another. But despite a seemingly straightforward revenge plot, its storytelling frequently turns too complicated for its own good.
It is 1890, in that hazy era when the Wild West was in the final stages of being tamed. Cornelia Locke (Blunt) is an English noblewoman who has come to America seeking revenge on the man she blames for the death of her son. Her trail crosses that of Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a veteran of the U.S. Army’s Pawnee Scouts, who frequently had to take up arms against other indigenous people. She is seeking vengeance, while he just wants to claim a plot of land he’s owed — even as everyone he meets warns him that white people won’t actually let him have it. So they travel together, sometimes with him saving her, sometimes the other way around, as the seemingly delicate Cornelia proves surprisingly handy with a rifle, a knife, and a bow and arrow.
As the menacing Mr. Watts (Ciaran Hinds) — the first of many threats standing between Cornelia and her final target — puts it, she is “Not quite the woman I expected.”
Blunt’s steely, badass side is less surprising to anyone who has watched her in everything from Edge of Tomorrow to Jungle Cruise, but it’s still a note she plays incredibly well. Spencer is considerably less famous (probably best known for playing Sam Uly in the Twilight films), but matches his co-star in physical presence and quiet intensity. He’s fantastic. Blick throws a host of British and Irish actors at the two leads, including Toby Jones, Steven Rea, and Rafe Spall, and invites them to chow down on the beautiful but sparse scenery around them. (Some do this better than others, which we’ll get back to.) While Jones is doing an American(ish) accent, the majority of the Americans that Cornelia encounters are specifically indigenous people like Eli, or like John and Katie Clarke (Gary Farmer and Kimberly Guerrero), who are trying to figure out life now that their land is becoming part of the Oklahoma Territory.
Blick is using the pulpy outline of Cornelia’s quest as a hook on which to hang a lot of commentary about how this country was colonized by outsiders with little respect or compassion for the people already living here, and about the challenges that come with trying to assimilate into a new landscape and/or culture. The white people keep arguing with each other about who is and is not a real American, all the while treating people like Eli as either useful tools, people to be re-educated for “polite” society, or simply target practice.
But this turns out to be a Trojan Horse situation where the horse winds up being more useful than the soldiers hiding inside it. Blunt and Spencer are just so charismatic, both together and in the stretches of the season when they are separated, that the show’s loftier ambitions begin to feel besides the point. Blick and cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer also place their two leads into a series of gorgeous compositions. (Sometimes, it’s literally painterly, like making Cornelia appear to be in a watercolor as she arrives at Watts’ place, or turning Cornelia and Eli’s discussion of constellations into something very much meant to evoke Van Gogh’s Starry Night.) The whole thing is great to look at.
It is also, though, a great headache to follow much of the time. While many of the supporting players are colorfully drawn and well played by the likes of Guerrero or (as a frightening bandit queen with a very specific grudge against indigenous people) Nichola McAuliffe, it becomes challenging in a hurry to keep track of everyone’s true motivations — or, at times, even how Cornelia or Eli get from one point of the story to the next. While many streaming shows suffer from not having enough story to fill the allotted episodes, The English often plays as if Blick wrote 12 episodes, then had to squeeze everything into half that, not always gracefully.
And good luck once Spall shows up as David Melmont, a shady bruiser in the employ of Wyoming cattle baron Thomas Trafford (Tom Hughes). Both men share past bonds with Cornelia, but Spall’s mumbly working-class English accent makes most of his scenes — and what they have to reveal about Cornelia’s motivations — impenetrable. You can complicate what should be a streamlined story, but only if you can properly explain those complications by the end. And Blick only manages to do that some of the time.
Despite that, the leads and most of the supporting players are just so much fun to watch, as is the show as a whole, that my experience with The English wound up being not too dissimilar to when I saw The Honourable Woman, minus the raging fever. I couldn’t tell you a lot about why things happen, and yet it was a pleasure to sit through another Hugo Blick tale of a woman finding herself on foreign soil, navigating a labyrinthine story tied to long-hidden secrets. And the epilogue — which explains exactly why Blick was so eager to apply a very British lens to a classically American genre — is so lovely, it washed away a lot of my frustration and forehead-wrinkling from earlier in the season.
Blick remains a fascinating filmmaker. I would just like to see him try to make something that doesn’t require a Carrie Mathison conspiracy board to fully comprehend.
All six episodes of The English premiere Nov. 11 on Amazon Prime Video. I’ve seen the entire season.
