To paraphrase Bob Marley: “who shot the western?” There are a number of smoking guns when it comes to this particular murder. Was it Michael Cimino, the megalomaniacal visionary behind Heaven’s Gate, an epic so wildly out of control that it killed an entire film studio? Was it the audience and their shifting political mindset that slowly rejected it, finding less insight in their old-fashioned storytelling and stock characters? Or was it the industry itself, shooing the idea of spending millions in Monument Valley when they could shoot something more profitable in a warehouse? Whichever way you slice it, there’s something incredibly quaint about a new western riding into theatres in the year 2024. So who better to lead the wagon train than Viggo Mortensen, one of our best rugged gentlemen who never looks more at home than in the wilderness. His sophomore directorial feature (that also sees him chalk up further credibility as a multi-hypenate talent, here as lead actor, director, writer, producer and composer), The Dead Don’t Hurt, is perhaps the perfect way to remind people of what can work so well in one of cinema’s oldest genres: the wounded beating heart of the great American frontier.
Mortensen is Olsen (“just Olsen”, as he repeatedly tells new folk in his life), a Danish war veteran living on a quiet homestead on the outskirts of Elk Flats, a Nevada town riddled with corruption and villainy. We meet him at the worst moment of his life: the burial of his late wife, French-Canadian ex-pat Vivienne (the remarkable Vicky Krieps), taken too soon by a cruel and aggressive illness. With their young son Vincent (Atlas Green) in tow, they up sticks and leave for pastures new, just as hateful killer Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod, an actor with an uncanny ability to look exactly like Seth Rogen from one angle, and Jack Reynor for another) gets away with murder at the local saloon. As their paths move ominously closer together, Mortensen takes us on a tender journey through the memories of Olsen and Vivienne’s turbulent romance that struggled like a desert flower to grow against the harsh reality of 1860s America.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Mortensen is a deeply romantic filmmaker. From his doomed love story in The Lord of the Rings to the melancholy ache of Lisandro Alonso’s Argentinian western Jauja, there are few actors who wear the weather of time and the scars of regret on their face better than him. He has clearly learned a tremendous amount from living as those particular characters, and The Dead Don’t Hurt plays out as sweetly and sadly as you would think a western directed by Aragorn would. He and Krieps share a rare chemistry dependent on vulnerability and the strength found in just that, and he goes to great yet subtle lengths to illustrate their egalitarian relationship as three-dimensionally as possible. However, the struggle for them to exist as such in a brutal frontier where the law is soft and its people’s morals are weak gives the film something to grapple with that results in both its most interesting strength and its greatest flaw.
Mortensen’s humble and sensitive look at life and love on the range is the ideal argument for how to tell old stories with a new perspective, one informed by age, experience and a deep affection for complicated people.
As the flashback story peels back its layers and reveals the tragedy at its core, there’s something bitter and hard to swallow beneath everything. Circumstance and masculine codes of honour drive a wedge in between them, leaving Olsen in great danger in a foreign land and Vivienne open to the barbarism of the Old West, and the film takes a hard look at the misogyny cultivated by the misuse of power and the chauvinism too often found right next to it. Whether Mortensen’s screenplay required indulging in the trope of a woman’s suffering resulting in a man’s complicated redemption is up for debate, but there’s an earnestness in how Mortensen carefully draws Olsen and Vivienne as two sides of the same coin who become broken in their own ways when life splits them apart. In that respect, The Dead Don’t Hurt strides a familiar path in a confident and well-rounded way, occasionally stumbling into rote misfortune but keeping its head held high as it moves forward to a progressive conclusion.
Perhaps none of this would be possible without the magnificent Vicky Krieps. Still somehow one of the most undervalued performers of her time, her role as more-than-meets-the-eye waitress Alma in Phantom Thread should have been the start of non-stop offers of great films coming through her letterbox, and seven years later, this is one of the first roles that has given her something substantial to work with (Bergman Island and Corsage notwithstanding). Her early scenes alongside Colin Morgan’s irritating fop give her the opportunity to dispense many a withering look, and her lightly-flirtatious meeting with Mortensen shows how likeable a presence she can be when shooting a cheeky, impish smile at the man in her sights. Like Mortensen, she has an unpolished, characterful face that makes her feel like a real person from a real time, borne of and rooted in the soil she works with day-in, day-out to scratch out a small slice of heaven in an unforgiving land. Her crackling chemistry with Mortensen’s wry, blunt man of morals makes this a quiet little western with something to mourn, even when its structure and overall picture becomes shaggier and less disciplined as time goes on.
Roles for Garret Dillahunt and Danny Huston as a despicable duo pulling the strings behind the scenes are fun and have plenty antiquated dialogue that reads like pure chewing tobacco for the two seasoned character actors to graze on and spit out, as does Solly McLeod as the most obvious man-in-black seen in years. Their presence adds a few extra sides to the story that don’t ultimately add up to much, reeking of a generic obligation to include scenes of cigar-chompin’ bad guys plotting their way to the top. Yet for every one of these scenes, there’s something new; anachronistic visions of a knight on horseback (wielding none other than Mortensen’s own iconic sword Andúril, Flame of the West from The Lord of the Rings) punctuate emotional movements of the film beautifully, and its quieter moments of tending to the land are filled with a beauty sometimes reserved only for slow European cinema. At its core, this story has an old-fashioned goodness emanating from it that more films could use, especially from the riskiest, least profitable genre of the current moment. Catching this before Kevin Costner’s costly and expansive Horizon diptych is a must; Mortensen’s humble and sensitive look at life and love on the range is the ideal argument for how to tell old stories with a new perspective, one informed by age, experience and a deep affection for complicated people.
The Dead Don’t Hurt is exclusively in UK and Irish cinema. Distributed by Signature Entertainment
