The Revelation That is Godless
Godless. image courtesy of Netflix.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the Western looms large in the history of cinema. But it has never made a full-blown return to its mid-century salad days, largely because studios in recent times over-did it, taking the typical Western template and slopping on layers of aliens and CGI and Johnny Depp with a dead bird on his head. But when a contemporary Western goes back to basics and gives us a slimmed down, compact morality tale set in the windswept back-country of our own history and our own minds it can be a beautiful thing. And such a thing is Godless, a series that first streamed on Netflix in 2017.
Created by Scott Frank, who is also the vision behind the remarkable new Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, Godless is a beautifully rendered tale of people - some decent, some bad, quite a few in the middle - trying to scratch out an existence in the American Southwest. The show looks great. The costuming, the cinematography and the overall production design are just top-notch, which of course is essential when you’re doing a period piece. The audience needs to feel like they are being sucked into this time capsule, and the show completely delivers on that front. It is very immersive.
The story it tells is pretty simple - an outlaw turns on his mentor, gets taken in by a small mining town with a tragic past, and together they have to confront the encroaching demons of their own sins. There are quite a few redemptive character arcs, interesting personalities and some ruminations on God and destiny and families and so forth. Of course, all of this is punctuated by the occasional gunfight or other acts of violence and villainy, anchored by Jeff Daniels’ performance as the Big Bad, a mystical outlaw with an odd moral compass. Hey, even Lady Mary from Downton Abbey is in this show!
There is warmth, there is tragedy, there is humor and there is gunfighting. This show deeply understands the world of the Western, and it flourishes in it. What Scott Frank gets about the Western is that it works best when it is not flashy, or overwrought. When it tells a story of basic human archetypes - the lawman, the outlaw, the rancher, the store owner - thrown together and scratching around in the dirt while occasionally shooting each other in the face, then it can really make for great cinema or television. Add on some strong female characters and Godless easily supports the idea that the Western still has a place in pop culture iconography, if it is scaled down, executed with attention to detail and with a few flourishes rather than a dump truck of CGI.
