3 months ago
21
The Abandons ★★
More driftwood than Deadwood, this western manages to squander the significant star power of its two leads: Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones). As frontier rivals from different worlds who ultimately share a never-back-down fanaticism, the pair play characters hemmed in by uncertain storytelling and awkward execution.
Lucas Till as Garret Van Ness and Gillian Anderson as Constance Van Ness in The Abandons.
The show isn’t sure whether it’s updating the western or celebrating the genre’s timeless tenets. The Abandons settles for a jack-of-all-trades approach, which means it masters none.
From the first scene, set around the fictional town of Angel’s Ridge in America’s then-Washington Territory in 1854, wealthy matriarch Constance Van Ness (Anderson) is resorting to sabotage to drive out a handful of farming families, led by scrappy Irish widow Fiona Nolan (Headey) and her adopted children, whose land she needs to save her faltering silver mining company.
It’s an undeclared war, fought at night with harsh glares by day. When it gets personal, a heinous crime from both sides makes the business bloodily personal.
The Abandons was created by Kurt Sutter, who previously oversaw the outlaw motorcycle gang saga Sons of Anarchy. The horsepower is different, but the philosophy is similar: the characters ride from one meeting to another, making alliances and starting fights. Constance dallies with armed robbers and defiant members of the verdant landscape’s Native American Cayuse tribe, but there’s little sense of economics, logistics, or community. It’s not clear how Angel’s Ridge operates, so the townsfolk mostly stay as outlines.
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Sutter didn’t finish the show, as he left the production near the end of shooting after Netflix reportedly watched rough cuts of the initial episodes. The subsequent patch-up work and edits are readily apparent, whether it’s the tonal shift between episode one and two, or storylines being started but barely developed.
Most worrying is how certain scenes resort to one of Netflix’s worst habits: having a character say aloud what is readily apparent, to help along viewers distracted by a second screen.
The result is competent but uninspiring. In their respective close-ups, Anderson gives Constance a furious restraint, while Headey leans into Fiona’s pious defiance. Unfortunately, the writing doesn’t find a way for either way to genuinely articulate what motivates them.
It’s a welcome update to make the protagonists of this western female, but it’s still familiar if they end up repeating the arcs of their male predecessors.
One brief shot fascinated me – a frontier teenager’s bedroom – but The Abandons struggles to rise above violent pastiche. To be as obvious as the narrative hand-holding, it’s a misfire.
The Abandons is now streaming on Netflix.
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