‘The English’ Review: A Striking but Jumbled Western Melodrama

The unlikely duo at the heart of The English is brought together by the kind of trouble that sends a knife into a man’s back. In 1890, the affluent Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) travels from England to the United States to avenge the death of her son. It isn’t long after her arrival in the desolate plains of Kansas that a gang of brutes takes her captive, but she’s quickly rescued by Sergeant Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Pawnee veteran of the American Indian Wars, recently retired from the U.S. Army.

As Cornelia prepares to flee the place of her capture alongside Eli, she wonders what she’ll do with her luggage. Her new companion offers his wisdom: “Difference between what you need and what you want is what you can put on a horse.” Unfortunately, Eli’s axiom seems lost on The English, which consistently opts for excess over restraint, with disorienting results.

Throughout its six lean episodes, the Amazon series leaps back and forth in time as it follows the lives of cattle ranchers, war criminals, bushwhackers, hustlers, homesteaders, and officers of the law. The connections between its diffuse narrative strands remain murky for much of its running time, making the proceedings feel scattered, unfocused, and incoherent. Few things, however, are clearer than love and revenge—and the relationship between Cornelia and Eli achieves far greater acuity than the developments that surround it.

Writer-director Hugo Blick establishes the tenor of their partnership at the outset of the series, which begins with Cornelia reflecting, in a breathy, half-whispered voiceover, on how she met Eli more than a decade ago: “It was in the stars. And we believed in the stars. You and I.” The two travelers are carried across the American West on an air of melodramatic romanticism, driven by their faith not just in love, but in justice, redemption, and themselves.

The visual depiction of Cornelia and Eli’s journey is often stunning. Cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer plays with the rising and setting sun, with the shadows it casts and the sprawling expanses it illuminates, to paint images of arresting beauty that reveal the nature of the show’s characters and the lands they inhabit. The first of such shots occurs less than a minute into the first episode: Eli stands on a ridge, the sky a dreamy orange behind him; both he and the earth he stands on are cloaked in shade, suggesting the unknown future awaiting Cornelia on faraway shores.

The action sequences are framed with similar deftness. Moments of quiet but palpable tension simmer before boiling over, like an early standoff that pits Eli and a tinker (Toby Jones), on a wagon, against a trio of horsemen. The tinker informs Eli that he’s installed guns in the body of his wagon, imbuing the scene with explosive stakes and leading to a fun point-of-view shot from the perspective of one of the hidden weapons as a foe gradually enters its line of sight.

The English’s sonic landscape is also rich, from Federico Jusid’s often stirring score to smartly deployed diegetic sounds. When Cornelia, while riding through a gorge, cocks her rifle, its echo both conveys her isolation and gives pause to the distant strangers watching her like vultures.

The series attempts, through the travails of Eli, Cornelia, and others, a sober interrogation of the American empire. It examines the mythology of the nation, including with intriguing invocations of Emily Dickinson and the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, to explore the ramifications of invasion, profound physical and sexual brutality, and bigotry. Illness is a central concern, both as a metaphor—America, The English contends, has long festered at its core—and as a tangible force, a resilient weapon with which Europeans decimated native peoples.

But the edges of this historical reckoning ultimately prove dull. Cornelia’s adventure through the American West, and her swift transformation into a killer with a heart of gold, doesn’t rebuke myth and fantasy so much as reimagine it. She recognizes that the land is lived-in, that Eli and countless others have shaped it, called it home, for an eternity, but she still manages to find in it a blank slate, a springboard for violent self-reinvention, as so many of her predecessors have before her. In the end, The English, at war with itself, succumbs to its own romanticism.