In GODLESS, the Jeff Daniels character is everything that makes a great villain. He is evil, of course. And he will spill blood, vast quantities of it, at the drop of a hat. But he is also articulate about his worldview, charming and fair in his twisted way, and in significant emotional and physical pain. When he explains his backstory to the immigrants unlucky enough to run into him, what becomes terrifyingly clear is that he exists in his own moral universe, and that every atrocity he commits seems perfectly reasonable to him, given his formative experiences. He’s fascinating to listen to. You might even enjoy a conversation with him, if you weren’t worried about him killing you along with the rest of your entire fucking town, for some perceived slight.
As Will Graham once said of another monster, the Tooth Fairy, “Somebody took a child and made a monster.”
Over on Twitter, there are angry threads bitching that the “town of women” doesn’t dominate the storyline more than it does, grimly counting the lines spoken by women as opposed to the lines spoken to men. While I am aghast that there exist people so humorless and so driven by cant that they sit by the screen with a stopwatch, counting up lines, it happens to be genuinely true that even in this story, where that “town of women” is an important element, the most active protagonists are a quintet of men — the villain, the fugitive, the marshal, the sheriff and his deputy — and that along with subsidiary male villains they get, between them, about two-thirds of the dialogue. There are two or three fascinating women as well, but so far only one of them has gotten any of the traditional western action, and this to me makes sense; we are talking about a story that begins with a status quo and then threatens it. But we wouldn’t know how that plays out in the early stages.
That said, a) it does little good to explode with outrage because a story doesn’t have the structure you would have liked, to condemn it outright because of that, instead of judging it on its own merits, and b) at the halfway point, at least, we don’t know how the women of the town will affect the story in its closing movements.
What does matter is that, judged on its own merits, this story is superb.