How much of The Dead Don’t Hurt could you cut out without hurting it? Quite a bit, I’m guessing. It’s a slow and steady western, and that’s at least partly the point of it, an exercise in style and genre that could be quite a bit shorter but also a fair bit longer without changing its complexion.
The story it tells is archetypal as are the characters in it. But the focus is on the woman, unusually, which brackets this alongside Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, another distinct and handsome movie with a female focus.
It’s directed by Viggo Mortensen, who also takes a key role (he stepped in at the last second, apparently, when his intended actor pulled out), as a Dane not long in America who hooks up with Vivienne (Vicky Krieps), a newly arrived Frenchwoman. Together they start building a life together in a scrappy shack in a godforsaken location, which she starts to turn into a home.
Mortensen works through familiar western figures as he paints his picture of homesteaders trying to eke out a living. There’s also a local rancher whose psychopathic son we meet in opening scenes shooting up the town. A crooked mayor who’s franchising the town out to corporate interests. The nervous barkeep. The piano player who must keep playing. No undertaker, though, which seems to be missing a trick, especially since one of the first shots we see is of Holger (Mortensen) burying Vivienne.
Mortensen wrote the story too, which jumps about between the present, starting with the burial of Vivienne, and going forward from there into payback territory, then the past, of Holger and Vivienne meeting, making a life together and then it all falling apart. And back further, to Vivienne’s youth in France, where as a little girl she devoured stories about Joan of Arc and dreamt of chivalrous knights.
Holger is her knight, she is brave and steady Joan, and it all comes to naught. There’s not much to laugh about in this drama with plenty of bad people to cycle through, though Mortensen makes sure it’s a good looking journey – the locations are striking, the cinematography (by Marcel Zyskind) is lush, the music has string-quartet simplicity (there may be more than four players but not many more) and is composed by Mortensen too.
If the story didn’t set me alight, it also did not bore me. It’s fascinating, not least trying to work out what Mortensen is up to with all this. It’s eventful and yet feels almost eventless. The big moments – he’s burying his wife in the opening moments, for god’s sake – come and go like a lapping wave. There’s a huge amount of restraint.
The performances are particularly good, with the standout moment being when Vivienne first meets Holger and, without really saying anything to each other, the pair of them just fall in love. Krieps and Mortensen just bat it back and forth. Beautifully played, fabulously directed.
Solly McLeod is spectacularly nasty as Weston, the rancher’s son with a mean streak a mile wide. In case we don’t get it, Weston is dressed entirely in black. As his enabling father, Garret Dillahunt puts in a self-effacing performance as Alfred Jeffries, a man with his own anger management issues. Danny Huston goes for dad John’s vocal mannerisms (think Noah Cross in Chinatown) in his portrayal of the bent mayor.
The Dead Don’t Hurt does not re-invent the wagon wheel but it rolls along luxuriantly its well-greased axle. Moments of explosive release are few and far between, but there is one – a kind of gunfight finale moment – when Mortensen gives us the sort of resolution that we want. And then it’s back to the stately procession.
The Dead Don’t Hurt – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
