Review: ‘Abandons’ tries to mine new ground, but treads old Western ones

Ah, the Western. That great American canvas, upon which many sorts of motion pictures have been projected.

In 1939, the year John Ford made “Stagecoach,” elevating John Wayne to stardom. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry would also have television careers, birthing a wealth of Westerns — “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Rifleman,” “The Virginian,” “Maverick,” “Have Gun, Will Travel.” This year we’ve had “American Primeval” and “Ransom Canyon,” the ongoing brilliance of “Dark Winds” and the continuing adventures of Taylor Sheridan.

With so many movies and television series working that vein over more than a century, it’s no surprise that the same material turns up again and again. “The Abandons,” a new Western premiering this week on Netflix, is thick with old plot points and character types.

Admittedly, creator Kurt Sutter has given the tropes a bit of a spin, making two women — played by Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey — adversarial matriarchal leads, but the nuts and bolts come right off the shelf.

We are in the town of Angel’s Ridge in Washington Territory in the year 1854. Constance Van Ness (Anderson) and Fiona Nolan (Headey) are widows, each in charge of her business, turf and adult children.

Constance is upper-class, cold, refined, ambitious and the owner of a silver mine. Her brood consists of Willem (Toby Hemingway), the problem child; Garret (Lucas Till), the younger but more capable son and trouble in his own way; and Trisha (Aisling Franciosi), a fair flower who will nonetheless curse like a sailor at times.

Fiona is her almost mathematically conceived opposite, an earthy rancher with four adopted grown children; there’s a horrible dead husband in her backstory.

Production is down at the mine, which Constance fears will make “my primary associate, the esteemed Mr. Vanderbilt,” as in Cornelius, withdraw his investment, which in turn will make Angel’s Ridge slide “back into the mud” and won’t do Constance any good either. (The town, as even the sheriff describes it, belongs to her.)

So she lusts after a suspected vein of silver running under Jasper Hollow, occupied by Fiona’s ranch and three other families, none of whom are in a rush to leave, despite a) her offers of money and b) acts of sabotage to force them to go. They debate whether to “go to the law” or handle her themselves, and because they are democrats, vote on it.

The collision of wealthy, often industrial interests with humble workers on the land has been the basis of many a Western; we are meant, as feeling humans, to side with the farmers and the ranchers against the mine owners as custodians rather than despoilers of the Earth. That Willem calls Isaac the blacksmith “a dirty little Jew” doesn’t speak well for the Van Nesses, either, but we’ll see much worse from him before the opening episode is out — and then we won’t see him.

On the other hand, Fiona is more than a little crazy and Constance, in her icy way, can seem almost reasonable. At times it seems that the two, as mothers, might be about to make some interesting connection, even common cause, but they are driven apart by mutual antipathy and the fact that each will be guilty of some awful stuff against the other.

There’s a “Romeo and Juliet” subplot as well, involving Elias and Trisha, and though Sutter may not have had Shakespeare specifically on his mind, given that his “Sons of Anarchy” contained a whole lot of “Hamlet,” it seems not unlikely.

In spite of supercharged performances by the two leads, there’s something pasteboard about the characters, drawn in thick outlines but not really colored in; that the actors are saddled with old-timey dialogue makes them less rather than more real. (As is often the case, minor players make a more lifelike impression, including Michael Greyeyes and Michiel Huisman, who do work, cleaner and dirtier, for Constance, and Ryan Hurst as one of the Jasper Hollow inhabitants, a quiet man with a past and a way with guns, another popular Western type.)

The series is busy, certainly, and frequently violent, with a few impressive set pieces, but majestic Canadian scenery aside, “The Abandons” feels artificial, schematic. (Good characters get to make pure, naked love; bad ones have pervy sex — implied, not shown.) Any random three minutes of “Deadwood” or even a still photo of Wayne seem more genuinely expressive of its times, however historically accurate or fanciful they may be.

In spite of a nicely conceived main street and a decent complement of extras, Angel’s Ridge itself never comes alive. (Patton Oswalt appears briefly as the mayor, his only real job to provide a body for expository dialogue to stream across.)

The silver mining at the bottom of all this business isn’t portrayed at all, nor are any practical matters of running a ranch; everyone’s too busy fussing and feuding, I suppose. Cornelius Vanderbilt, glimpsed briefly on his way to visit Constance, disappears, presumably to resurface in the concluding three episodes; and by “concluding” I mean whatever brings us to the cliffhanger I assume is coming.