We binge-watched the seven-hour mini-series Godless in three marathon nights.
Godless is a Western, or more exactly a fantasia on Western-movie themes and incidents. To the genre-literate, almost every plot element or character will be familiar, but shootouts and jail breaks and horse-rustling and miraculously healing bullet wounds were re-combined in ways that kept our attention. I'm proud to say that I didn't fall asleep once during the three long evenings, which is quite a compliment to the series, inasmuch as I've recently emerged as an Olympic-quality narcolept, prone to drift into sleep at the drop of a hat, even during the second overtime.
The three most interesting features of Godless, were, in my opinion, a) the landscape, which, although it surrounds us here in Boulder, seemed particularly crisp on the hi def screen, b) the horses, which are noble beasts of their own and were respectfully depicted and admired by the cinematographer, and c) the character of MaryAgnes, played by Merit Wever, who was rather wonderful in the role and who was rewarded with a lot of the good lines. MaryAgnes is a tough young rifle-toting crack shot who plays for the other team but who you want on your side.
I thought that Jeff Daniels who played the ruthless mass-murderer Frank Griffin overacted like crazy. If overacting were a crime, he'd be looking at a good twenty years in solitary. Plus I know it's the fashion that your deranged evil charismatic lunatic villain always has to be a bible thumper yet let's face it -- that's a cliche that has served its purpose and earned its retirement. Speaking of religion -- even aside from the title of the series and the observation that it's a godless country there's a heck of a lot of religion stuff both good and bad but mostly bad in this series. For example, much of the backstory evokes the Mountain Meadow Massacre -- one of the most dreadful acts of domestic terrorism in our nation's history -- which was perpetrated by Mormons (although Mormon participation is underplayed and instead the atrocity is attributed to a nonspecific religious fanaticism). There are frequent scenes of worship and pilgrimage as well as intermittent focus on the new church that the villagers of LaBelle are constructing and specifically on the fashioning of a substantial cross that is photographed as though it were brimming with significance. Moreover, the inhabitants of LaBelle wait six and seven-eighths episodes for the new preacher to arrive but when he finally appears he has only the most banal platitudes to deliver. Frankly, I'm not positive whether the writer of Godless thought the preacher's speech was genuinely profound or whether he couldn't give him better words, or whether he was trying to assert that the pieties of faith offered no consolation whatever to the beat-up townspeople. It would have been better if the preacher had just sung an appropriate hymn and let the LaBelleians join in so we could at least end with good music.
Godless offers a number of revisionist moments where tradition is overturned, sometimes too obviously. An instance: LaBelle is inhabited almost entirely by women and it is the women who make the decisions and take the active roles; men are passive bystanders. Quite an inversion of the usual macho practice. And also: usually in the westerns when there's the threat of intermarriage between the races, it's the dark skin who gets killed. This time the commonplace was turned on its head with the gratuitous killing of he white guy -- but I think it was a bit too pointed to name him "Whitey." And the Indians: now that we have the word "orientalism" to describe the mythologizing and falsifying of people of the east, we could apply the word "Indianism" to the romanticizing of the Paiutes, who are depicted as repositories of supernatural mystery and tribal wisdom (which is I suppose is a step up from brutal savages, but still not respectful or true). "Indianism" leads to a grotesque failure in the story when the sheriff is accompanied by a lone brave on horseback who may or may not be a ghost and who should have thudded to the cutting-room floor (along with some faux-spiritual nonsense, totally out of place, about the sheriff losing and regaining his shadow).
The series centered on the conflict between father and adopted son -- a borrowing straight out of Red River, but this time around there's not going to be a reconciliation. The allegorically-named son Roy Goode winds up shooting his father, up close, pistol to temple. Which I liked a lot, because, first of all, I was by this time totally inured to violence, and also because the evil addled father-villain-prophet repeatedly claimed the ability to foresee his own death and "this isn't it." "You're wrong," says Goode, pulling the trigger. So much for prophecy. Immediately afterwards, the hero rides alone into the sunset -- not into a metaphorical sunset but a very real and carefully photographed sunset -- even though if he had his wits about him he would take his more-than-a-match lady friend with him. It's a unsatisfying conclusion and one that is dictated, I think, more by the zillion Saturday afternoon Westerns of my childhood than by the internal logic of the film. She loves him. But Western heroes named Goode just plain love their horses more than hearth, home and sex and they are all secretly afraid that if they marry and allow themselves to become domesticated they'll wind up like poor uxorious powerless Van Heflin in Shane.
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