M, 129 minutes
4 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
A saloon door swings closed, dust swirls across a main street and the saw-toothed profile of nearby mountains look on as a lone horseman in a Stetson rides out of town. His business is done.
Ah, it’s a pleasure to succumb to the tropes of the western with their familiar look and feel. Since the studios stopped making the traditional kind decades ago, its spirit has been kept alive since with some alternative take, as movies try to shuffle the deck and revive the genre for a new age. Perhaps the western will have a comeback. Stranger things are happening.
Actor and now writer-director Viggo Mortensen is the latest filmmaker in a long list of luminaries, from Quentin Tarantino to the Coen brothers to Jane Campion, to respond to the lure of the western. Mortensen offers a pair of unconventional characters who have, for their particular reasons, decided to build a future in the wild landscapes of the American West.
Just for the record, The Dead Don’t Hurt is a Canadian, Mexican and Danish coproduction and was filmed outside the US.
It is set early in the 1860s, at the time of the American Civil War. Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Mortensen) and Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) cross paths in San Francisco, become lovers and head for Nevada. Their home is an isolated cabin on unpromising land beneath an immense escarpment. Happy and in love and in pursuit of the dream, they rehabilitate the basic house and plant flowering plants and trees in the parched earth.
In time, there is a barn under construction, but the build is suspended when Olsen takes himself off to war, in response to the call to arms. The Union needs men of honour, so Olsen heads off to New Mexico to join up. It is the ‘right thing to do’.
A pair of unconventional characters who have, for their particular reasons, decided to build a future in the wild landscapes of the American West
His determination to make a stand against slavery is the action of an upright man with independence of mind, but it leaves his partner, Vivienne, extremely vulnerable. She has already come to the notice of a violent young man, Weston Jeffries, a frequent customer at the town saloon. Since she took a job there as barmaid, wanting salary of her own, she is right under his nose each time he visits, and he really fancies her.
Weston embodies just about everything that was wrong with the West. Played with chilling conviction by Solly McCloud, he is a reckless, vicious bully, with friends and family in influential places to ensure others pay for his crimes. Like the hapless town duffer, Ed Wilkins (Alex Breaux), hung for a murder he never committed.
His death is one of several along the way, memorable for their stark brutality, that linger after the closing credits. It is, after all, the West, with tales of brutality and dispossession integral to the foundation myths of American society, and our own.
Writer-director Mortensen has been generous towards his co-star
It’s always a risk playing around with the continuity. Here, Mortensen has dropped in some of the final scenes of the narrative at the start. It works well enough, prompting us to ask how and why about the final outcomes, but the transitions aren’t always that smooth, so it isn’t always entirely successful. The pace is at some points ‘slow west’ but is much longer than the revisionist indie western of that name that we remember.
It is notable that after the man goes to war, the movie is all about the woman. The five or so years while Olsen is away fighting in war get no attention whatsoever on screen. Mortensen has been very generous with his female co-star.
As the French-Canadian woman, Vivienne, brought up on tales of Joan of Arc, Krieps’ challenge is to portray an unusual, possibly unlikely, figure. But this actress is excellent at making women of another historical period seem completely natural and believable on screen and worthy of our attention.
Mortensen’s screenplay is insightful, with surprising snatches of humour at moments that carry quite a bit emotional payload, and it’s refreshing. And he is watchable, as always. There are times here when it’s hard not to think of him in big event films like The Road, and even The Lord of the Rings, but the thoughtfulness and simple elegance of this, the second film he has directed, hold sway.
First published in the Canberra Times on 6 December 2024. Jane’s reviews are also published on Rotten Tomatoes