Scott Frank’s seven-part western is handsome, patient and well acted, and Jeff Daniels and Merritt Wever are the best of a strong cast. It is also two episodes longer than its story, and it keeps setting aside its best idea, a town run by women.
Scott Frank wrote Get Shorty and Out of Sight, crime films in which people talk far more than they shoot, and Godless, which he created, wrote and directed across all seven episodes, is his western. It is set in the New Mexico Territory in the 1880s, mostly in and around La Belle, a mining town where an accident underground has killed most of the men and left the women to run what is left. It is a good series, made with care and acted with more than care. It is also two episodes longer than the story it has to tell, and we felt every one of the extra hours.
It opens well. Marshall John Cook (Sam Waterston) rides into Creede after Frank Griffin’s gang has been through, and Frank keeps the camera back and the music away, so we take in the whole street before we understand what is hanging over it. We were horrified, and it was the quiet that did it. Nobody screams, nothing burns, the wind moves the dust about, and a decent man on a horse looks at what people have done and has no words for it. The series never frightens us as much again, and we are not sure it means to.
Steven Meizler shoots the country wide and low, riders small under a sky that takes up two-thirds of the frame, and he is fond of the hour when the light goes orange and the shadows run long across the grass. David J. Bomba and Carlos Barbosa give La Belle a half-finished look, raw timber and a cemetery that is bigger than the main street. Betsy Heimann dresses the women in the practical browns of people with work to do and puts Griffin in the long black coat of a man who wants to be taken for a preacher. Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score is mostly guitar, sparingly used, and Michelle Tesoro cuts as slowly as Frank writes, holding on faces for a beat past the point another editor would leave.
Jeff Daniels plays Griffin quietly, which is the right choice and the frightening one. He does not rant. He reasons with people, explains why what is about to happen is only fair, and sounds as if he believes it. Jack O’Connell, an Englishman, holds an American accent for seven episodes and plays Roy as a man who says as little as he can and means all of it; the two of them are built to be compared and the comparison holds. Michelle Dockery is stony and capable as Alice, and Tantoo Cardinal, given less than she deserves, makes Iyovi the one person on the ranch who is never fooled by anybody.
The best thing in it is Merritt Wever. Mary Agnes has taken to wearing a dead man’s clothes and running a town that did not ask her to, and Wever plays her as blunt, tired, funny and quite unbothered by what anyone thinks. When the mining company sends Ed Logan (Kim Coates) to talk the widows out of their property, she does most of the town’s thinking for it. Scoot McNairy’s Bill McNue is nearly as good: a sheriff going blind who knows it, and knows the town knows it, and carries on. Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Whitey Winn, quick with a pistol and slow with everything else, is the boy every western needs.
Which brings us to the complaint. La Belle is the most interesting place in the series, and the series keeps leaving it. Whenever Frank has a town of women deciding what to do about a mine, a church and a gang on the way, he cuts to Roy and Griffin and the long business of how they came to know each other, told in flashbacks that stop the present dead. By the fourth episode we had started to resent them. Most critics have been warmer about the series than we are, and we understand why, because the parts are handsome; the trouble is the order they come in.
The story heads where westerns head, and we will not describe how it gets there. Set against the genre, Godless is honest work, closer to the patient westerns of the seventies than to anything flashy. Watch it one episode a night rather than in a weekend, and forgive it its flashbacks; the town is worth the wait.
