Godless Review: One Writer’s Western, Carried by Its Women

Netflix released all seven episodes of Godless on November 22, 2017. Scott Frank wrote and directed every one of them.

That is the fact that matters most about this miniseries, and it is the fact most likely to be missed. Godless is not a show with a showrunner and a writers’ room and a rotating bench of directors. It is one writer’s Western, shot as a single seven-hour block, and it carries the shape of a thing made by one hand.

Trailer, via Netflix.

Roy Goode Rides Into La Belle

The setup is a chase. Jack O’Connell plays Roy Goode, a young outlaw who has broken with his gang and is running from the man who raised him. That man is Frank Griffin, played by Jeff Daniels, and Griffin is described in the show’s own terms as a ruthless outlaw who terrorizes the West looking for his former member.

Roy lands in a small New Mexico town. The year is 1884. The town is populated almost entirely by women, which is the premise the marketing sold and the premise the show mostly honors.

Frank’s gang is coming. Everyone in La Belle knows it before Frank arrives.

Michelle Dockery and the Women of La Belle

Michelle Dockery plays Alice Fletcher, a rancher and a widow, and she is the show’s center of gravity rather than O’Connell. Merritt Wever plays Mary Agnes, who runs the town’s hotel and its nerve. Tantoo Cardinal plays Iyovi. Samantha Soule plays Charlotte Temple, Kayli Carter plays Sadie Rose, and Audrey Moore plays Sarah Doyle.

Scoot McNairy plays Bill McNue, a sheriff losing his sight, and Sam Waterston plays Marshall John Cook. Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays Whitey Winn, and Kim Coates plays Ed Logan.

The cast is the argument for watching Godless. Dockery gets a role with dirt under it after years of corsets, and she takes it. Wever is the best thing in the miniseries, funny and hard in the same beat. Daniels plays Griffin as a preacher with a gun, which is the right read.

A Miniseries With One Voice

Frank shot all seven episodes. That is rare, and it shows in the pacing. Godless does not reset between hours. It builds.

The cost is real. A single director with a single visual idea means the show has one temperature for seven hours, and by episode five the long looks and the wide horizons start to feel like a house style rather than a choice. The middle sags. The women of La Belle are the reason to stay, and the show knows it, but it keeps cutting away from them to the men.

The series began production in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in September 2016. That landscape is doing a lot of work here, and the show is smart enough to let it.

Release Schedule

All seven episodes dropped at once. There is no weekly run to follow and no cliffhanger to wait on. That is the right call for a story with one arc.

What Godless Gets Right

The show’s best idea is that the town is not a refuge. La Belle is a place where the men are dead or gone, and the women have organized around that absence rather than mourned it. Godless takes that seriously for most of its run.

The show’s worst idea is Griffin. Daniels is good, but the character is a sermon, and the miniseries keeps handing him speeches when it should hand him silence. The villain explains himself too much. The women do not explain themselves at all, and they are better for it.

Godless was named one of the year’s 10 best by The Washington Post and Vanity Fair. That is a fair read of what it is. It is a well-made, well-acted, slightly overlong Western with a genuinely new premise and a familiar ending.

It scores 75 on Metacritic and 7.5 out of 10 by the published critical score. That number is right. Godless is not a great miniseries. It is a good one with a great cast, and the gap between those two things is Dockery and Wever.

Watch it for them. Watch it for the town. Do not watch it for the outlaw.

Godless · Michelle Dockery · Netflix · Scott Frank · TV Review · Western