By Erin Free
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Garret Dillahunt, Danny Huston, Solly McLeod
Intro:
...an inspired, quietly mesmeric work...
Though often painted as hoary and out-of-date, the western genre has always been fertile cinematic soil for laying in seeds of contemporary commentary. Whether it’s the Vietnam allegories of the 1970s (Chato’s Land, Soldier Blue and many, many others), the police brutality echoes present in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, or the sly media-and-fame takedown of Kirk Douglas’ Posse, the western is frequently a lot more than just a horse opera built on ideals of what’s wrong and what’s right. Lately, the western has found itself the home of some rich feminist thinking courtesy of the recent TV series Godless and books like Kathryn Hore’s The Stranger and Charlaine Harris’ Gunnie Rose series. Nestling in very comfortably amongst these is The Dead Don’t Hurt, a gritty, daringly non-linear western from writer, director and star Viggo Mortensen which poetically forefronts the painful struggles of a woman alone on the American frontier.
That woman is wonderfully self-possessed European immigrant Vivienne (Vicky Krieps), who abandons a life of comfort with a wealthy blowhard to instead take up with soulful Danish farmer Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen). The pair grow in each other’s company and make a sweetly bucolic if hardly luxurious life together just outside the small town of Elk Flats in Nevada. When principled former soldier Holger leaves to fight in The Civil War, Vivienne is left to fend for herself. Strong, resourceful and keenly intelligent, this is no problem for Vivienne…but the men of Elk Flats are. The town is essentially run by powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), who has the mayor (Danny Huston) in his pocket and everyone else on the hook. While Alfred is quietly menacing, his son, Weston (Solly McLeod), is a loud, obnoxious, bullying, mean-spirited bastard…and he has eyes for Vivienne, which ultimately sets in motion a tragic chain of events.
Viggo Mortensen is an actor who has always made strongly considered choices that never hinge on money or power; sure, not every film he appears in is great, but none of them are crappy, low-IQ bottom-feeders. There are no simplistic actioners on Mortensen’s resume, nor lame comedies, and certainly no superhero movies. The closest he’s ever come to a “blockbuster” are the Lord Of The Rings films, and they hardly rate as by-the-numbers cinema. Mortensen is perhaps the only actor of his level who makes exclusively meaningful films, and he appears to be continuing that career trend as a writer and director.
Mortensen’s 2020 debut feature Falling was a simmering, richly impressive father-son drama winningly pitted with idiosyncrasies and emotional grace notes, and The Dead Don’t Hurt is just as good. The themes are rich and assured, while the script is effectively minimalist, never using a word when one is not necessary. The painterly cinematography by Marcus Zyskind effectively captures both the beauty and savagery of The Old West. The film’s non-linear structure intentionally wrong-foots the audience, denying easy comfort at every point of the film’s dark, foreboding journey.
Like many good actors turned director, Mortensen draws masterful performances from his cast. Danny Huston and Garrett Dillahunt are terrific as smarmy bad guys, but young British actor Solly McLeod has the villain market cornered here with his striking turn as the brutishly entitled Weston, ingeniously playing this intimidating thug like a big child who has never heard the word “No” and thus lives his life doing pretty much whatever he wants. Mortensen excels as the slightly distant, diffident Holger, whose selfish need to battle in The Civil War becomes a violent catalyst. The film truly belongs, however, to Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), who gives an Oscar-level performance as Vivienne. Graceful, magnetic and singularly tough but deeply sensitive, it is, quite simply, the kind of performance that Meryl Streep built her extraordinary career on, and it will hopefully be recognised come awards season.
A voluble, heartbreaking meld of character drama, feminist storytelling, visual poetry, shattering violence, and western genre revisionism, The Dead Don’t Hurt is an inspired, quietly mesmeric work from a writer, director and actor who has talent to burn, and a finely tuned moral compass guiding him to use it wisely.
