In an honest attempt to revive the cinematic western, Viggo Mortensen – who directed, wrote and starred in “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” in addition to composing its music – offers several different westerns in one.
Not counting a deathbed prologue, the film initially seems to claim a place in the law-and-order corner of the genre. Mortensen, as a grieving sheriff named Holger Olsen, seems skeptical when a town idiot is accused of six murders and apparently claims to remember none of them. The local courthouse – a makeshift affair cobbled together in the living room – is not the most forgiving place for the wrongly accused, or for anyone else. (At one point, instead of banging a gavel to call for order, the judge fires his gun upwards twice, then looks up at the ceiling to make sure it won’t collapse.)
We’ve already seen the killer. Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), the legitimate and vicious son of the area’s leading rancher, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), is introduced in the middle of the party: he is first seen emerging from the saloon and casually shooting two people in a single take before the title card appears, hanging over a corpse.
But before “The Dead Don’t Hurt” can become a film about a good sheriff’s efforts to correct a miscarriage of justice, it goes back to tell the story of another character, Vivienne Le Coudy (played in as an adult by Vicky Krieps). A sharper, more classic western might have kept her off the screen, relegating her to the sheriff’s story.
By painting on a larger canvas, Mortensen gives his film an interlocking, sometimes unnecessarily complicated structure. (Vivienne’s French-Canadian childhood provides some somewhat superfluous flashbacks.) Once the adult Vivienne meets Olsen—she prefers to call him by his last name—they set about building a life together. Olsen is a skilled carpenter; Vivienne has the gift of shooting poultry. She cleans up his dusty, drab plot of land and inspires him to add some greenery.
But all is not happiness on the farm, as the civil war announces. Olsen, who served as a soldier for his native Denmark, believes it is a moral imperative to fight for the Union, leaving Vivienne at home to fight in what Olsen later notes is his own war, with the predator Weston as his main antagonist. .
Filming primarily in Durango, Mexico, Mortensen deftly manages the division of perspectives and drama – when Olsen goes to war, the film cedes center stage to Vivienne – without ever losing interest or proportion. Only the ending, a supposedly poetic farewell note, too gentle for the raw spectacle that preceded it, and too detached from its themes, appears to be a weak point.
Even then, with performance this good, it’s hard to care. Both Krieps and Mortensen are immensely aided by cinematographer Marcel Zyskind’s delicate use of sunlight and shadow, and McLeod makes a terrifying brute. Mortensen’s ambitions may be old-fashioned, but they are big ambitions, and he realized them in a beautiful passion project.
Dead people don’t hurt
Rated R for gun violence and sexual assault. Duration: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters.
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News Source : www.nytimes.com
