Godless : A Netflix Original (Review)

 I am a fan of movies and TV shows based in the American West. Not all of them have to be Westerns. In fact I have not seen any movies of John Wayne, the classic Western icon. Maybe I will, one day. The message of the glorified cowboy who wins the West and its pioneer trailblazer construct does not appeal to me much.

It was Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy that introduced me to the westerns. These spaghetti Westerns were not classic Hollywood fare at the time. They didn't have just one good cowboy, what they had was a mixture of good, bad and ugly in the same people, fighting each other against a fantastic background score. And these Leone westerns were not even shot in the U.S! 

Places and things interest me more than people. The starkly beautiful, hostile wide-screen landscape is appealing to my eyeballs. The history of the westward expansion was another aspect, how it affected the conqueror and conquered and it all happened so close to the present. I have documented my love for the stories of the West a few times in this blog - here, here, here.

 

Godless is a Netflix mini-series that dropped in 2017. Yes, I am late to the party. But better late than never, right? It is written and directed by Scott Frank (director of Minority Report, Get Shorty) and the executive producer is Steven Soderbergh. The heroes in Godless are ordinary folks fighting their own personal battles and more than half of them are women. Although not exactly the feminist Western the series was marketed as, a frontier town without able-bodied men is a new take. 

The powerful performances by the women actors do justice to the story. Sam Waterson, Jeff Daniels, Jack O'Connell, Michelle Dockery, Merrit Weaver, Scott McNairy play some of the important characters in the series. It seems funny to me that for an American western TV show more than half of the lead cast is from U.K.

The Hollywood cliche trap that even Godless couldn't escape is when there is a powerful female character in a leadership role, she inevitably has to be a lesbian. Have they not seen hetero-sexual leaders like Angela Merkels, Golda Meirs or Maggie Thatchers of the world or our home-grown Kamala Harris ? Or is it done as a symbol of political correctness and inclusivity to make sure they don't leave any minority groups out? I am looking at you Mindhunter (Wendy Carr), Xena and Batwoman. It is almost as if a hetero-sexual woman won't have the balls to take on the leadership role intended for the said character. 

Godless captures the epic scale, wall to wall geography of the West faithfully making even trigger-happy TV remote user like me soak it in and keep my fingers off the fast forward button. As expected from the title, there are no Gods in Godless. It is set in a territory of lawlessness and struggle. Yeah, the struggle is real in 19th century New Mexico. 

 

Edifices dedicated to a higher power are conspicuously absent. The story is mostly centered around the silver mining town of La Belle, NM where a church building is seen to be in perpetual construction state and is never seen finished. All the men of the town perished in a mining disaster, except the grocer, the saloon owner and the sheriff and a few other old men.

 

The series is written as a journey through the lives of the people in La Belle as they advance towards the ultimate showdown (which will happen in La Belle) between two outlaws - Roy Goode and his adapted 'Pappy', Frank Griffin, both gun-slingers and outlaws of the finest kind. Roy being a Goode, the makers of the series are trying to tell us that there is some good in him. Guns play an important part in the show, but the lead character Roy Goode, while he is an ace shooter, sometimes belts out dialogs like he is a spokesperson of a gun control advocacy group, which is okay be me. Goes to show that even among gun-toting outlaws the voice of reason and reality was not always a lost cause.

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The Big Country & The Assassination of Jesse James by Coward Robert Ford

The American West is the stuff of myth and legends. While East coast was all about the original boat people aka the Puritans and the blue bloods, the West was the indefatigable frontier that drew in the itchy feet adventurers and crazy eyed outlaws.I have been enamored by the landscape of the West, despite having no birth-right citizenship connections to it.

The wide brown expanse of semi-aridness playfully taunted by rolling tumbleweed, sweeping hills dotted with cattle or the majestic outcrops of rock that have hid many a vigilante - the once famed frontier of the US of A is indeed poetry in landscape mode.

Recently I had a chance to watch a couple of beautifully shot Westerns, made fifty years apart.

The first one is1958's The Big Country. The wide angle shots of this outdoor epic directed by William Wyler (dir. of Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur,...) makes the title very appropriate. Shot in Mojave desert using a large screen cinematography technique called Technirama, the movie starred Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives (won the supporting actor for his role) and Jean Simmons. It is often called as a Western for people who do not like Westerns. It even has a New-Englander pacifist - Peck's character James McKay for a hero.

Jerome Moross composed the remarkable score for the movie which has been reused several times in ad campaigns and such - it is a musical piece that captures the essence of all Westerns.



While looking up the shooting locations of the movie, I found an interesting page - Orvis Cattle Company & Ranch.

About the story of the movie, you can watch it yourself if you want to know. I liked Burl Ives' Rufus Hannassey, the best. Peck as McKay was overly Gandhian for my taste, but great performances by all actors nevertheless.

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Then from 2007 came this visual poem of a Western - The Assassination of Jesse James by Coward Robert Ford. This is the first movie I could truly feel sympathy for a character played by Casey Affleck - the anti-hero to Brad Pitt's anti-hero - Jesse James, a notorious outlaw at the time. Affleck is a perfect fit for the hero-worshipping mumbler turned Judas, Bob Ford.

Roger Deakins' cinematography is evocative of vintage photos with blurry edges. The vast wheaty prairies and the still life shots of life in the old West with close-ups of complex characters is a visual treat. The sombre, nuanced nature of the narrative is aided by the intermittent voice-overs, like that of a historical observer.

Directed by Andrew Dominik, the sweeping frames of the movie is one of the few characteristics it shares with the classic westerns. It is a slow-burn film, delving on and developing its characters in an un-predictable way although the ending is self-evident from the movie title.

Maybe because it was the presence of Brad Pitt in the leading role, I felt it had something common with slow sweeping crescendo of the movie, Tree of Life by Terrence Malick.

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Hell Or High Water

West Texas is the romanticized West of twenty first century Hollywood still populated by outlaws, sheriffs and thousands of cows. The edgy element of romance is provided by skeletal still art of derricks dotting the desert-scape, populated by dirt-poor ranchers, slick oilmen and occasionally, in saunters Jeff Bridges in a cowboy hat.

In Hell or High Water, West Texas is played by Eastern New Mexico. Same difference, the same earth under the same sun on either side of an invisible human-drawn administrative line, apparently invisible lines have no effect on geographies.

In addition to the strangely addictive West Texas-Jeff Bridges combo, Hell or High Water has a great cast and a subtly kick-ass script by Hollywood’s true Texan writer – Taylor Sheridan. Directed by David Mackenzie, the movie is about two brothers taking revenge on a financial institution, to put it indirectly staying clear of spoilers.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster work the dynamics of an endearing brothers-in-arms duo, one a happy go lucky ex-con and the other a reserved and protective father. The brothers are balanced on the other side of the law by two Texas rangers – wise-cracking Jeff Bridges and a half Comanche-half Mexican ranger played by Gil Birmingham. There is an interesting tension between these two law men characters  colored with sarcasm and racial jokes yet their banter (mainly one-sided by Bridge's character) has the looking out for each other, brother-from-another-mother quality.

The camera panning the desolate expanse of the desert towns and the story chasing the brothers through the lone star state's western outposts  captures the hopelessness, isolation and rapidly creeping poverty of the region. If you like neo-Westerns (there might or might not be cowboys, by Western I just mean they are shot in the American south west) check out Serpico, True Grit or Nocturnal Animals, the desert is a prominent player in all these remarkable movies.

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