By Jake Wilson
THE DEAD DON’T HURT ★★★
(M) 129 minutes
If you were feeling uncharitable, you could call Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt an example of the vanity Western, like Kevin Costner’s ill-fated Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, which galloped through cinemas earlier this year. Mortensen and Costner belong to a generation that grew up with the Western as a Saturday matinee staple – and both seem bent on playing cowboy well into their senior years, even if neither stands a chance of matching the longevity of Clint Eastwood.
Viggo Mortensen succeeds in tapping into the gentler, more lyrical side of the Western in The Dead Don’t Hurt.
But where Costner’s Horizon was all over the place, Mortensen’s second feature as writer-director offers a distinctive proposition about what a 21st-century Western could be. At best, he succeeds in tapping into the gentler, more lyrical side of the genre in the spirit of classic Hollywood directors such as Broken Arrow’s Delmer Daves.
While violence is far from absent, the action takes second place to the central love story, touchingly acted by the leads: Mortensen as laconic Danish carpenter Holger Olsen, and Vicky Krieps as the similarly self-possessed Vivienne Le Coudy, a French Canadian immigrant with a talent for gardening. These two meet in bustling San Francisco, where they click right away – though, as a modern woman of the 1860s, Vivienne is in no rush to become anyone’s wife.
Vicky Krieps stars as Vivienne, an uncommonly resourceful frontierwoman, in The Dead Don’t Hurt.
Still, she’s willing to accompany Olsen to his humble cabin in the foothills of Nevada where, after an initial adjustment period, they look set to live happily ever after until he heads off to serve his adopted homeland as an unusually grizzled Union volunteer. Rather than following him into battle, the film sticks with Vivienne as she awaits his return, working in a saloon where she’s forced to fend off other, less chivalrous men.
Summed up like this, it’s the oldest story in the book, the one about a woman in peril (in a different kind of Western, she might hire a wandering gunslinger as a bodyguard or even take up arms herself). On-screen, it’s more complicated since the narrative keeps jumping around in time – forward to after the war and backward to Vivienne’s childhood, with a couple of brief medieval visions somehow linked to Joan of Arc.
Especially early on, all this generates a certain amount of confusion, which appears to be partly intentional but not entirely so. Mortensen is not a naturally smooth cinematic storyteller, and on this occasion, hasn’t had much help from his editor, Peder Pedersen (on the other hand, his cinematographer Marcel Zyskind makes great use of the locations – mainly the craggy scrubland of northwest Mexico, which for Western buffs will feel like home).
Under the circumstances, it’s easy to overlook how traditional and even conservative the film is at heart, perhaps despite its maker’s conscious intentions. The dialogue tells us Vivienne is like the sea, impossible to pin down – but events suggest she’s better off under the protection of a good man, just as he’s better off when she joins him in the wilderness and starts planting flowers.
The Dead Don’t Hurt is released in cinemas on December 5.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.