Hugo Blick’s six-part western is photographed like a painting and acted, by Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer, with real stillness. The middle episodes pile up strangers and subplots until we lost the thread, and the dialogue is written to be quoted rather than said.
Hugo Blick writes and directs all six episodes of The English, a western about two people crossing the plains in 1890 for reasons neither will say out loud at first. Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) has come from England with a bag of money and a man she means to kill. Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer) is a Pawnee who scouted for the cavalry for years, has just left it, and is riding north to land he was promised. They meet at a hotel in Kansas run by Richard M Watts (Ciarán Hinds), who has Eli strung up outside and has already counted Cornelia’s money as his own. It is a good series and an annoying one, and we would recommend it to anyone who likes the genre, with the warning that the third and fourth hours will test their patience.
The hotel sequence is the best thing in it. Hinds plays Watts as a host, pouring drinks and making conversation about England while explaining, politely, why Cornelia will not be leaving. We were horrified, and it was the courtesy that did it: a man deciding whether to kill a woman in the tone of one asking if she takes sugar. Blunt sits through it in a lilac travelling dress with her hands folded, and Spencer, roped to a post outside the window, does the listening for us. Blick stages it slowly, in one location, and it is the only stretch of the series where nothing feels padded.
It is a handsome thing throughout. Arnau Valls Colomer shoots the plains at the ends of the day, sky taking up most of the frame and people reduced to two dark marks on the grass, so that every conversation looks like it is happening at the edge of the world. Chris Roope’s buildings stand alone with nothing behind them: a hotel, a farmhouse, a fort, each one apparently the last structure for a hundred miles. Phoebe De Gaye dresses Cornelia in pinks and lilacs, the only soft colour in a landscape of ochre and dust, which tells you what the series thinks she is doing there before she does. Federico Jusid’s score is mostly guitar and low strings, and the decision to open on Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You is a good one; it sets the mood of a lament before anything has happened.
Spencer is the reason to keep going. He plays Eli with a low voice and almost no gesture, a man who has learned that saying less keeps him alive, and we watched him harder than anyone else on screen. Blunt is doing something showier and it mostly works: Cornelia treats her grief as a job to be finished, and the moments where the job slips and the woman shows are the ones we remember. The two of them together, riding in silence or arguing about who owes whom, are enough to carry a series. Blick does not quite trust them to.
Instead he keeps introducing people. A Cheyenne woman, Touching Ground (Tonantzin Carmelo), and the family Eli finds himself among. A cattle baron and his men. A sheriff, a lawless town, a homesteader with her own dead to account for. Each is given a scene of the sort that sounds like it was written to be read aloud at an awards dinner, and then the series has to remember where it left the two leads. Somewhere in the fourth episode we stopped being able to say who had wronged whom, and we were bored, and then irritated at being bored by a series this well made. Ben Yeates and Andy Morrison cut the wide shots with patience, but no editor can shorten a plot.
The dialogue is the other problem. Everyone in this West speaks as though they have had a fortnight to think about what to say, and the lines are frequently good, which makes it worse; you can hear the writer enjoying them. Toby Jones, as the coachman Sebold Cusk, gets one early scene and makes his speech sound like a man talking rather than a script, and we wished more of the cast had been allowed to do the same.
The last two episodes pull it back. The strands come together, the violence is fast and ugly rather than operatic, and the ending, which we will not describe, is earned by Blunt and Spencer rather than by the plot. Watch it two episodes at a time, and do not stop at the fourth. The scenery will keep you there; the two people standing in it are the reason to stay.
