Difference between what you need and what you want is what you can put on a horse

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2022.  

#45 : The English

Hugo Blick’s beguiling western was a stunning tale of loss, love and vengeance beautifully told. It followed Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) – a woman out for revenge for the death of her son – whose path to Wyoming collides with pawnee scout Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), who is heading home to claim his rightful land. What ensues is a classic wild west adventure, but with a female lead giving the finest performance of her career.

I meant to watch this and I saw a lot of write-ups that said it was one of the best things on telly last year, but somehow it never happened.  Until now...

Well, the Wild West really doesn't look like it was a lot of fun.  But that doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun to watch all the treachery and violence - that's all very enjoyable, but more than sometimes a little too hard to follow for the small of brain.  I needed Wikipedia there to explain to me what was going on, but if you're going to watch it I suggest you pay careful attention to the years that flash up on the screen at times.  There's also quite a lot of things that happen that seem to have no obvious reason behind them - I suspect I must have missed some subtle details, but internet research isn't explaining it to me.  I actually don't think I need to tell you anything more than The Guardian tells you above - as you can imagine a woman and a Native American don't have the easiest time of it.  I'd also suggest you don't go into this hoping for a happy ending, but it is very dramatic though!

It has quite the cast to it - Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer are at the core of the story (although they're nowhere to be seen in a surprising amount of scenes) and they're both excellent.  Emily has more of the journey to go on and she grabs the opportunity with both hands but you'd expect it because she generally puts in a decent shift - if you haven't seen her in Looper, Edge Of Tomorrow, Sicario, A Quiet Place or Mary Poppins II then they're all well worth checking out.  Obviously I don't need to tell you about her voice performance as Tempest Shadow/Fizzlepop Berrytwist in My Little Pony - The Move though..

Chaske Spencer is much more inscrutable (inscrutabler?) throughout but it's still an impressive performance.  I didn't think I was previous aware of him, but I'd actually seen him in both Banshee (which contains possibly the most violent fight scenes I've ever seen) and Sneaky Pete (fun nonsense) - but you (yes - you, I see you) are more likely to know him from the Twilight films (he was Sam Uley, whoever he was).

There are quite a few other names scattered throughout the impressive ensemble cast - Rafe Spall (very good and almost unrecognisable as quite the baddy), Stephen Rea (bad at being good), Toby Jones (only slightly bad), Ciaran Hinds (REALLY bad) and Nicola McAuliffe (both mad and bad).  I didn't know Valerie Pachner beforehand but she gets a name check for putting in a good turn in exalted company.

It looks very beautiful indeed - there is, unsurprisingly a load of scenery for us to feast our eyes upon.  There are also some fantastic sunsets and sunrises and some absolutely gorgeous skies as well - it's all very wide-open spacey.  They've also done a good job with the sets - there's a lot of wagons and frontier towns on show.  I know that Hugo Blick is highly regarded as a director but was I unsure exactly what he'd done before - and having checked his Wikipedia entry I'm still pretty unclear because the only thing I recognised was Marion & Geoff, which was unusual but it's hard to see how it lead to this.  The one thing I learned that did surprise me is that he says the line "Have you ever danced with the devil by the pale moon light?" in Tim Burton's Batman.

There was a lot to enjoy about this - it felt very authentic, looked absolutely fantastic and had some great acting performances delivering some real tension in places.  But, as a whole, it didn't really hang together for me - maybe this was my fault because I should have paid more attention, but maybe it is just the case that it doesn't hang together.  It is worth watching for the scenery though - I enjoyed having it on as visual wallpaper and if you fancy some of the same it's available to watch on both iPlayer and Amazon Prime.

#43 - Somehow both grim and dull
#46 - Surprisingly enjoyable