The Dead Don't Hurt
[info headline="Release date"]7 December 2018[/info]
[info headline="Language"]English, Hindi[/info]
[info headline="IMDb Rating"]7.4[/info]
[info headline="Genre"]Action, Fantasy, Science Fiction[/info]
[info headline="Cast"]Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson[/info]
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One of my great great
great grandfathers fought for the Union and survived
the Battle of
Antietam. After his infantry unit was wiped out, he hid under
a heap of corpses. As
a child, I often found myself thinking about a person doing what he did and
then going on to live a normal life, or whatever was classified as normal in
the late 1800s. I thought about him again watching Viggo Mortensen's film
"The Dead Don't Hurt," a movie that injects the sorts of monumental
moments of suffering and violence that you're used to seeing in more
traditional, action-oriented Westerns into a tale that is mainly interested in
the relationship between a man, a woman, and a child, and the intrigue among
various characters who live in the nearest small town.
Written, directed and scored by Mortensen (in his second
venture behind the camera, following the contemporary family drama
“Falling"), and set before and during the US Civil War, “The Dead Don’t
Hurt” has standard genre elements, but treats them as a way into something
different than the usual. There's a sadistic psychopath who dresses in black,
some rich men who lord their power over a Southwestern town, a goodhearted and
soft-spoken sheriff, his steely wife, their beautiful, innocent son, and other
variations on types that you tend to encounter in movies set during this period
of US history. But there are no stagecoach or train robberies, quick-draws at
high noon, extended gunfights, dynamite explosions, etc. There is violence of
various kinds, and it's presented realistically and unsparingly, but not at
such length that the movie seems to be getting off on pain. The pacing is what
you would call "slow" if you don't like the movie,
"deliberate" if you do.
Mortensen stars as Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant who ends
up as the sheriff of a small town in the American West. He lives in a tiny
cabin in a canyon. I won't tell you exactly where the movie begins or ends
because it's nonlinear, and accounting for things in the manner of a linear
timeline would give a false impression of the movie and spoil important
moments. Suffice to say that Holger goes to San Francisco and meets Vivienne Le
Coudy (Vicky Krieps), a French Canadian flower seller, and takes her back to
his cabin, where she overcomes her disappointment at his bare bones lifestyle
and tries to build a life for them and the son they will eventually raise
together.
At the same time, the movie keeps returning to the
aforementioned town, which is controlled by an arrogant businessman named
Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), his violent, entitled son, Weston (Solly
McLeod), and the town mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston), who controls most
of the local real estate, plus the bank. There’s tension surrounding the
ownership of a saloon that's tended by an eloquent barkeep-manager named Alan
Kendall (W Earl Brown). A shootout depicted early in the movie passes the saloon
into the hands of the Jeffries family. Vivienne ends up working there. Weston
takes a fancy to her, and doesn't respond well to being told he can't have her.
I mentioned earlier that this is a nonlinear movie and I’m
mentioning it again here just in case you think there’s any standard
cause-and-effect dynamic at work. It takes a while to get used to how the story
is told. Mortensen’s script deliberately
confounds the way our moviegoing brains are typically asked to function. He
starts near the end of his story and moves from the present tense into
different parts of the past as needed. Time-shifts are not tied to plot or even
theme. They seem as intuitive as brushstrokes in a painting.
There are also flashbacks to Vivienne’s childhood, wherein
she lost her father to war against the English—a trauma that sparks a dream or
fantasy about a knight in armor riding through a forest. This image connects to
the midsection of the movie, which is where Holger impulsively decides to
enlist in the Union army to go off and fight against slavery and earn a
promised enlistment payment, leaving Vivienne alone in that tiny house in the
canyon. This might strike contemporary viewers as a casually callous thing to
do, but it’s the kind of thing that happened plenty back then, and tends to be
described in family histories with a sentence like, “Then he went off to fight
in the war and came home a year later.”
The writing and acting of all the characters is intelligent
and measured. You get a sense of a complete person who lived a full life
offscreen even when you're observing a character who only has a few judiciously
chosen moments, such as Brown’s character, who is a bit too pleased with his
own eloquence but sometimes seems ashamed after he verbally runs roughshod over
others; or a judge played by Ray McKinnon who presides over the trial of a
citizen wrongly accused of a horrible crime, and carries on as if God guides
his gavel (a pistol butt); or a reverend played by veteran character actor John
Getz (of “Blood Simple” and “The Fly”) whose community role requires him to
oversee an execution whether it's justified or not. (Brown, Dillahunt and
McKinnon were all on the HBO Western “Deadwood,” a go-to casting resource for
this type of project; it's a treat to see them fully inhabit very different
characters from ones they've played in the past.)
None of the characters unveil themselves as you might
expect. Holger initially comes across as a Clint Eastwood-style, strong-silent
he-man archetype, but he's less decisive, more sensitive and learned. We often
see him reading books or writing in a journal or on parchment. He dotes on
Little Vincent (Atlas Green), his son with Vivienne, with a sensitivity and
physical warmth that’s unusual in male-dominated films like this. His
relationship to the Western hero code that’s often summed up as “doing what a man’s
gotta do” is complicated as well. Olsen makes a lot of decisions that would
result in negative comments on audience preview cards at a focus group
screening (hard to imagine Mortensen doing one) because they are, to say the
least, not things that a typical Western action hero would do. They’re more
like what a real person with a complicated psychology would do—things he might
regret in hindsight.
Krieps, who broke out with “Phantom Thread,” is the true
star of this movie, even though it’s bracketed by Mortensen’s character riding
out on a long journey. She's the only character who gets flashbacks and dreams.
She threads the needle of making her character seem self-assured, tough, and
self-respecting yet never anachronistically “feminist,” in the contrived, phony
way that a lot of period pieces feel obligated to write female characters of
earlier times. Though unassuming in how she applies technique, Krieps is a deep
and substantive film star, in the tradition of actresses from earlier eras like
Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman. She makes a connection with the viewer. You can
feel the hope drain from Vivienne when she keeps a stiff upper lip during awful
experiences that she has no control over. But you also feel the resolve when
she makes the best of a bad situation, and the excitement that blossoms in her
when she's treated as a person of value.
Not too many filmmakers have ever made movies like this, and
when you do come across one (such as Sam Peckinpah's "The Ballad of Cable
Hogue" or the Charlton Heston movie "Will Penny”, or “Deadwood”, or
the 1970s movie "The Emigrants") it stands out, in part because it
avoids the predicable, ritualized high points that the genre is built upon, and
instead concentrates on significant moments of interaction between characters
who do not have a 20th or 21st century mindset superimposed on them. The lack
of pandering to contemporary sensibilities means that all the characters remain
slightly at a remove from us throughout the story. It also means that they come
across as more real. Yes, certain aspects of the human experience are universal
and have never changed. But there is a huge difference across time periods in
how individuals understand themselves and each other, and this is a rare movie
that respects that.
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