What’s to be done with the western? Still quite a lot, it seems, as filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Kevin Costner keep coaxing this most ruggedly venerable of genres down intriguing new trails.
The Dead Don’t Hurt – written and directed by as well as starring Aragorn himself, Viggo Mortensen – feels at first like a relatively straightforward take on the form. But like a bar-room card sharp, it plays its hand slowly, making every glance and gesture count as the stakes steadily build. What’s more, its ambitious scope belies its indie pet-project status.
There is something of Heaven’s Gate in its tender central romance, as well as its interest in the tough lives of those European incomers finding a place for themselves in the western United States – where, even in the 1860s, a very shiny and sly (and therefore American) form of power was already flexing its tendrils.
Mortensen’s Holger Olsen is an honest immigrant type – so honest, in fact, that he serves as sheriff of Elk Flats, a small town out in the dusty nothingness of the Nevadan wilds. When we meet him, he’s being pressed into service by the town’s oily mayor (an expectedly good-value Danny Huston), despite the fact that Olsen is still grieving for his wife, who expires in the film’s opening scenes.
All of the above is staged like the beginning of a hard-bitten quest for justice. But due to the film’s unusual – and sometimes confusing – structure, we come to understand it as the end of another longer, more complex tale, in which Olsen’s lost love is no heart-sickening bookend, but a heroine in her own right. Played with grace and steel by Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, she is Vivienne Le Coudy, a French-Canadian flower seller whom Olsen saves from a rich and tedious suitor in San Francisco, before coaxing her back to his shack in the hills.
