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Emily Blunt’s Ultra-Violent Western ‘The English’ Tells How the West Was Lost
Ben travers.
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If many a Western captures the sweeping romance of America’s land rush — idealizing a time when seizing one’s future involved planting a literal flag — then “ The English ” serves as a bright red rebuttal; a revisionist take among the modern era’s various reconsiderations, this time emphasizing the tears, sweat, and oh-so-much-blood required to reach the dream awaiting colonizers somewhere west of the Mississippi.
Writer-director Hugo Blick (“The Honorable Woman”) still embraces traditional elements of the genre, centering his six-part Prime Video series around a rhapsodic love story and capturing plenty of vast prairies in picturesque, sun-kissed shots. But it’s the edge carved into every corner of “The English” that helps the limited series stand out. From the cutting dialogue to its jagged mystery, Blick’s latest story finds consistent success not by drawing pained parallels between past and present but by astutely acknowledging the ferocity ingrained in America’s identity all along.
The cast is also quite good. Emily Blunt produces and plays Lady Cornelia Locke, an aristocrat from England who arrives in America seeking revenge. Her son has died (under undisclosed circumstances), and she’s tracked those she deems responsible to these parts. Unfortunately, they’ve tracked her as well. Cornelia’s mettle is tested (and flaunted, as any action series featuring Blunt’s intimidating talents should) by a procession of colorful characters played by accomplished character actors, all happy to sink their teeth into spirited dialogue and mythic personalities.
Ciarán Hinds makes for a beguiling, tone-setting first opponent: “There are many who can welcome you to the real America,” Mr. Watts (Hinds) says, “but only one who can truly mean it.” His greeting includes a snazzy green vest, the signature piece of a formal three-piece suit (one of many striking ensembles made by costumer Phoebe De Gaye); a theatrical gesture toward the panoramic vistas in the distance (captured both in stark remove and lush detail by cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer); and courteous responses to her curt inquiries… all until he knocks her out cold in an attempt to steal everything she’s carried over land and sea.
This marks a fitting introduction for Cornelia to America and audiences to the series, as Blick builds early episodes around the alluring, aforementioned formal elements and, more generally, alternating moments of debonair discussions and shocking violence. Cornelia and Watts’ dinner table dialogue crackles with wit. Each actor speaks with infectious confidence and curiosity, and you’ll be chuckling along with them until the next surprise smack reminds you what’s at stake — and who they really are. Toby Jones, Stephen Rea, and Tom Hughes each get their time to shine, but respect must be paid to Rafe Spall for his all-in heel turn. Sporting a helmet-like bowler and speaking in a beefed-up Cockney accent, the late-arriving “Trying” star steadily builds a towering presence that would be too big for nearly any other show. Here, though, he’s just right — a boss you love to hate and hate to love, blending brutish charm and unspeakable savagery into an anti-gentleman who’s still able to flourish in a country that rewards such behavior, so long as a white man embodies them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back when Mr. Watts is welcoming Cornelia to the U.S. of A., just out of eyesight is an Indigenous American, tied up, beaten, and restrained. This is Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Pawnee-born ex-cavalry scout who only wants to claim the land that is rightfully his (twice over). Whipp, a man of few but purposeful words, served his time in the Civil War, even looking the other way when his fellow soldiers took out their frustrations, aggression, and fears on Indigenous people. Now, he’s traveling toward Wyoming, where he plans to lay claim to a few acres and build a new life. But if Mr. Watts’ assault doesn’t make this clear already, just about everyone Whipp comes across tells him the same thing: He’s not getting that land. And for the same reason he was attacked and tied up: “The color of his skin,” as Mr. Watts readily admits.
Despite his early predicament, Whipp’s path soon intersects with Cornelia’s. She claims it’s magic — a kind of fate ushered in by necessity and a mutual understanding between two good souls in a nation filled with bad ones. How they’re pulled apart and pushed together again makes up the murky, mysterious middle of an otherwise straightforwardly entertaining six hours (less, since most episodes run close to 50 minutes). “The English” over-complicates its plot at times, which, combined with Blick’s enthralling yet extravagant dialogue, can trip up an otherwise thrilling chase. (I found myself regularly skipping back and forth just to make sense of things — an odd feeling for a show with an easily understood intro and themes so clear they border on overkill.)
But what it may lack in efficiency, it more than makes up for in spirit. Blunt and Spencer create genuine characters out of their archetypes. (He a noble gunslinger who’s hunted where a white war hero would be glorified, she a frilly-dressed homesteader hellbent on vengeance, yet preserving a heart of gold.) “The English,” like the land on which it’s set, is built on contradictions. To describe it as a rollicking good time wouldn’t be far off, even if such unchecked elation doesn’t quite prepare viewers for the heartrending twists and turns. Blick’s latest is far from the first revisionist Western to imply the Wild West wasn’t as clean and proper as genre classics first portrayed, nor is it saying anything particularly profound by outlining how deep the roots of violence go in a country built by fleeing immigrants (and persecuted natives).
And yet those ideas still pack a punch. During the last few years of pandemic denials and political divisions, of COVID body counts and regular school shootings, plenty of modern aristocrats have wondered where our savagery and selfishness stems from; why there’s a tacit acceptance of so many seemingly avoidable deaths in the land of the free. “The English” outlines at least one theory: Bloodshed is the American way, and so is believing we can put it behind us. Blick’s explanation is nestled somewhere within the connection between its graceful aesthetics and ruthless inclinations, its sweeping romance and star-crossed lovers, its white flags and red ones.
“The English” premieres Friday, November 11 on Amazon Prime Video .
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‘the english’ review: emily blunt in amazon’s big, bold swing of a western.
Hugo Blick's six-part series pairs Blunt and Chaske Spencer as outsiders seeking revenge on the wide open prairie.
By Daniel Fienberg
Daniel Fienberg
Chief Television Critic
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As presented in Hugo Blick’s new Amazon limited series The English , the Old West was a dangerous place: a collection of breathtaking vistas connected by trauma from horrifying massacres, in which disease-ridden, testicle-eating outlaws sold their services to the highest bidder and the only currency more valuable than acreage was revenge. No place for a woman, but no place for a man either.
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The English is a beautifully shot exercise that’s always right on the border of saying something brilliant, only to more frequently settle for being a picaresque assembly of bizarre characters, bloody adventures and satisfyingly badass lead performances from Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer .
Blunt plays Cornelia Locke, a British aristocrat who arrives in the New World circa 1890 with trunks of regionally inappropriate gowns, bags of cash and one goal: avenging the death of her son. At a remote outpost on the Kansas plains, it becomes clear that Cornelia’s arrival and her mission have been anticipated by some powerful and threatening forces (embodied by Ciaran Hinds, in exceptionally supercilious form).
Also present in that outpost, by luck or by cosmic design, is Eli Whipp (Spencer), a Pawnee-born former member of the US Army cavalry. The white folks look at Eli as a Native. The Natives look at Eli as white. All Eli wants is to reclaim the property that was his birthright.
Cornelia and Eli’s futures are intertwined, and their pasts are connected as well; while the Old West is vast, it’s a small world.
The English is, at heart, a clear-cut tale of revenge, and I loved the simplicity of the first two episodes. I would watch hours of Blunt and Hinds sitting opposite each other noshing on prairie oysters and making insinuations of violence. Ditto Blunt and Spencer sitting under the stars, each feeling out the other’s motivations and mettle. Then the show has to go and become pointlessly circuitous for two episodes, as a combination of interchangeable actors obscured by period facial hair, unplaceable accents and purposeless time jumping make the story hazy for no good reason.
There’s a strong rebound in the closing episodes, which rise to a level of Grand Guignol grotesquerie as the long-promised revenge comes to a head. But when Blick reaches his elegiac conclusive thoughts on the genre’s mixture of affectation and authenticity, you may wish, as I did, that the middle of the season had had more of that and less twistiness-for-the-sake-of-twistiness.
Cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer shoots the heck out of the Spanish locations, meant to evoke, not impersonate, the Old West mystique. As in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog , foreign terrain stands in for the most American of geography, paralleling how Ford would use Monument Valley as a stand-in for the totality of The West.
You don’t need to share Blick’s checklist to get caught up in the camera’s careful compositions or the muscular and erudite dialogue. But appreciating The English on referential terms helps distract from a sense of actual history that’s a little superficial and an exploration of Indigenous cultures that improves on that of the traditional Western without marking a true corrective in the way that Reservation Dogs or Dark Winds have recently done.
Blunt and Spencer offer ample pleasures of their own. Blunt, already a veteran action hero, wields rifles and a rapier wit and does it all in Phoebe De Gaye’s stylishly constraining costumes. Spencer swaggers confidently as the Eastwood/John Wayne archetype with a soulful, outsider twist. Together, they have a pleasing chemistry, without the series forcing it to necessarily be romantic.
The nagging sense that the sloppy middle prevents the series from being something truly special by its heightened and emotional end is a minor disappointment. But its’ breadth, ambition and technical virtuosity make it well worth seeking out nevertheless.
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