In one of those weird, something-in-the-air Hollywood coincidences, June 2024 will, somehow, see the release of two separate passion-project Westerns in which the star of the piece is also both writer and director. Later in the month we’ll get Kevin Costner’s exceedingly grand-looking Horizon, and for now, perhaps to tide us over or whet our appetites, we’ve got an entire more modest offering from Viggo Mortensen in the form of The Dead Don’t Hurt. It’s an oddly fitting role for this elegiac but sluggish film to play, an appetiser for something more rugged and ambitious that slowly eases you in the world of the Old West without ever quite doing anything thrilling enough with it.
Mortensen stars as Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant and military veteran making a go of it in a house near an up-and-coming mining town way out west. On a brief sojourn into San Francisco, he meets Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), a French-Canadian flower seller in a relationship with an exceedingly boring posho who is immediately drawn in by Holger’s easy charm and practicality. Soon, Vivienne has moved on to Holger’s land, these two outsiders building their lives and love together as a new form of America is built around them.
Mortensen and Krieps’s performances and chemistry are easily the highlight of The Dead Don’t Hurt – Krieps has one of the best ‘falling-in-love’ faces of any currently working actor and it’s deployed to full effect here, while Mortensen brings a dignified melancholy to Holger. Their romance is a beacon of sweetness in a story that also includes Holger joining up to fight in the Civil War (which happens entirely off screen) and a conflict with the brutal and rape-y Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), whose penchant for violence is backed up by the money and power of his slimy father Alfred (Garrett Dillahunt) and the corrupt local mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston).
All the building blocks of a classical Western are here (Weston even wears a black hat and rides a black horse), but not enough of it coheres into something truly compelling. Mortensen splits his film into two timelines – one in the ‘past’ as Holger and Vivienne fall in love and face their trials, and one in the ‘present’, which actually opens with Vivienne’s death from syphilis she caught from Weston and Holger’s subsequent quest for revenge.
It’s never hard to follow which timeline we’re in – Mortensen does a good job of keeping that very clear – but we flash between them *constantly*. The result is a film that feels like it’s interrupting itself, never able to reach a crescendo, a feeling only exacerbated by how Vivienne’s fate is laid out in the opening minutes (and the fact that the revenge plot has quite a few echoes of the recent BBC show The English, which is in every way The Dead Don’t Hurt’s superior). There are certainly plenty of bright spots, with a great ensemble that includes a nice smattering of old Deadwood veterans and, of course, the sort of magnificent scenery that keeps this genre so eternally pleasurable to watch, but it’s ultimately too flimsy to stand up against its Western peers.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 