I never got around to Blickâs follow-up, Black Earth Rising, starring a pre-I May Destroy You Micaela Coel as a Rwandan-born law investigator living in London who gets caught up in a case tied to the Rwandan Genocide. So the premiere of his latest show, the Emily Blunt vehicle The English, provided a chance to see whether I could track a Blick narrative if the room wasnât spinning as I watched.
The experience of watching The English while healthy, though, proved roughly the same as bingeing The Honourable Woman from a sick bed. Blunt is fantastic, as are many of her co-stars. The whole thing looks gorgeous, and it has some thoughtful variations on Blickâs pet theme about what happens when people from one culture get mixed up in the affairs of another. But despite a seemingly straightforward revenge plot, its storytelling frequently turns too complicated for its own good.
It is 1890, in that hazy era when the Wild West was in the final stages of being tamed. Cornelia Locke (Blunt) is an English noblewoman who has come to America seeking revenge on the man she blames for the death of her son. Her trail crosses that of Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a veteran of the U.S. Armyâs Pawnee Scouts, who frequently had to take up arms against other indigenous people. She is seeking vengeance, while he just wants to claim a plot of land heâs owed â even as everyone he meets warns him that white people wonât actually let him have it. So they travel together, sometimes with him saving her, sometimes the other way around, as the seemingly delicate Cornelia proves surprisingly handy with a rifle, a knife, and a bow and arrow.
But this turns out to be a Trojan Horse situation where the horse winds up being more useful than the soldiers hiding inside it. Blunt and Spencer are just so charismatic, both together and in the stretches of the season when they are separated, that the showâs loftier ambitions begin to feel besides the point. Blick and cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer also place their two leads into a series of gorgeous compositions. (Sometimes, itâs literally painterly, like making Cornelia appear to be in a watercolor as she arrives at Wattsâ place, or turning Cornelia and Eliâs discussion of constellations into something very much meant to evoke Van Goghâs Starry Night.) The whole thing is great to look at
It is also, though, a great headache to follow much of the time. While many of the supporting players are colorfully drawn and well played by the likes of Guerrero or (as a frightening bandit queen with a very specific grudge against indigenous people) Nichola McAuliffe, it becomes challenging in a hurry to keep track of everyoneâs true motivations â or, at times, even how Cornelia or Eli get from one point of the story to the next. While many streaming shows suffer from not having enough story to fill the allotted episodes, The English often plays as if Blick wrote 12 episodes, then had to squeeze everything into half that, not always gracefully.
Despite that, the leads and most of the supporting players are just so much fun to watch, as is the show as a whole, that my experience with The English wound up being not too dissimilar to when I saw The Honourable Woman, minus the raging fever. I couldnât tell you a lot about why things happen, and yet it was a pleasure to sit through another Hugo Blick tale of a woman finding herself on foreign soil, navigating a labyrinthine story tied to long-hidden secrets. And the epilogue â which explains exactly why Blick was so eager to apply a very British lens to a classically American genre â is so lovely, it washed away a lot of my frustration and forehead-wrinkling from earlier in the season.
Blick remains a fascinating filmmaker. I would just like to see him try to make something that doesnât require a Carrie Mathison conspiracy board to fully comprehend.
