On the surface, The Dead Don’t Hurt, the second directorial venture from Viggo Mortensen (who also stars, writes, produces and composed the film’s elegantly pensive score), has the weathered, leathery look of a traditional Hollywood western. The story of a rocky romance between a spirited, rebellious woman and a strong, silent man, the film was shot, in imposing widescreen, largely on location in Durango, Mexico, a region that also provided the backdrop for numerous classics of the genre. John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly all made use of the wide open sky, sweeping vistas and photogenically phallic geological formations. There’s a rough-hewn drama to the look of the land, with jutting rocky outcrops contrasted against the squat, wind-blown vegetation of the scrubland. But scratch below the dust and the grit of what passes here for 1860s Nevada and Mortensen’s film reveals itself to be a quietly unconventional spin on this time-worn genre.
In a way, it’s a film that reflects the personality and creative approach of its director. Mortensen, after all, has a classic movie star bearing and bone structure that was put to striking effect as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. But his career choices subsequently have tended towards the intriguing and the offbeat – for every crowd-pleaser such as Green Book, there is a clutch of abrasive, challenging roles in pictures by film-makers such as David Cronenberg. It stands to reason that Mortensen’s interpretation of a western would venture somewhat off the beaten track.
At the centre of the film is a love story between two independent people who have both grasped the possibilities of the American west fiercely and on their own terms. Mortensen plays Danish immigrant Holger Olsen, a taciturn man who has clearly lived several full lives already, even before he settled in a modest shack on the outskirts of Elk Flats, Nevada. On a visit to San Francisco (“to see the end of the world”), Olsen encounters Vivienne (Vicky Krieps), a flower seller whose patience with her foppish blowhard of a suitor has reached breaking point. “Cretin!”, she exclaims in exasperation. Watching her from the city’s dock, Olsen is immediately fascinated.
And who can blame him? Krieps is terrific; her Vivienne has a rebellious spirit, a wicked sense of mischief and a love of beauty, qualities that set her some way apart from the ground-down, dentally challenged frontier folk in Olsen’s town. The daughter of French-speaking settlers, Vivienne grew up surrounded by trees and her mother’s romantic stories in the redwood forests near the border with Canada. She makes no secret of her disappointment in Olsen’s living arrangements. “So sad! No trees,” she sighs. “You live like a dog.” She stays, however, and softens the hard edges of Olsen’s primitive living arrangements with roses and bougainvillaea outside, and fabrics and furnishings within. The idyll is short-lived however. With the outbreak of the civil war, former soldier Olsen feels obliged to fight once again. And fate, in the form of the wayward son of the local rancher, has its own plans for Vivienne.
There’s a kinship in the storytelling rhythms and intimate character details between this picture and revisionist westerns such as Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff. The languid pacing (the film is sometimes a little too ambling and unhurried for its own good) and fractured, nonlinear structure chime with Mortensen’s arthouse sensibilities, rather than the more traditional view of what a frontier adventure should look like. And by shaping this portrait of the untamed American west through the experiences of first and second-generation immigrants, Mortensen plays with the all-American identity of a certain breed of mythic western (the kind that tended to star John Wayne, and which colour-coded its heroes with white hats and white skin).
Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind works wonders with the savage beauty of the landscape and the bristling tensions of the local saloon. And the sound design is rich and busy – the quiet that drew Olsen to his isolated corner of the world is never actually silent: there’s a constant chorus of insects and birds, all accompanied by the fickle whims of the weather. But for all this, the film is only fully alive when Vivienne is on screen. And this is a potential problem. It’s not a spoiler, since the film opens at her deathbed, but much of the action deals with Olsen’s muted struggle to balance his grief at the loss of his love against his desire for revenge against the man who wronged her.
The film’s structure is a partial solution – Olsen’s journey after her death is cut together with Vivienne’s story, her wits and her will parried against the hostile machismo of the frontier. But it’s telling that we only really notice the film’s deliberate pacing and dips in energy in the scenes that lack Krieps’s galvanising and magnetic presence.
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