Here in the pricey cow town of Santa Barbara, we tend to take pride in our own — even if they were only fleetingly based here. I’m talking about screenwriter/director Scott Frank, the UCSB graduate who has carved out an impressive film career over the years. The carving continues, this time into the rich soil of New TV, as writer/director (with Steven Soderbergh in the producer wings) of the impressive, binge-worthy, and refreshingly genre-juicing Godless. The seven-episode Netflix original, referred to as a “feminist Western,” lures viewers deep into terrain at once cozily familiar and fresh, or at least explored from angles less traveled.
Taking place in the vast, undeveloped American landscapes between small, mostly mining towns — it was shot in New Mexico — Godless invites consideration of as-yet little-tapped possibilities in the western narrative. Most notably, women play a strong role (much more affectingly than the Natalie Portman–starring film Jane Got a Gun). Another interesting distinction is Frank’s clever, interwoven storytelling arc, which takes advantage of the expansive length of a series — versus a single film — to delve into illuminating flashbacks and backstories. Typically, westerns leave character development to lean brushstrokes, assumptions about the past, and (hopefully) telling glances; Godless fills in blanks, to fuller effect.
A mining disaster has robbed the town of La Belle of most of its male population, and women have taken over. On a rambling ranch property “outside of town,” the gritty, life-toughened Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery) lives with her half-Paiute son and his grandmother shootsTK, and then takes in our Shane-like protagonist, Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell), who has betrayed his adoptive father’s, Frank Griffin’s (Jeff Daniels), former criminal outfit and stolen the take from a train robbery turned grisly.