The Dead Don’t Hurt

The-Dead-Don’t-Hurt
The Dead Don’t Hurt

My great great great grandfather fought in the Union army during the battle of Antietam and lost a few friends along the way. When everything was going down in his unit, he burrowed himself beneath the bodies of dead men. I remember being disturbed as a child, imagining how such a man managed to just move on…to whatever passed for normal in the 19th century. I would think about him again after seeing Viggo Mortensen in ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’. What this movie does is skillfully weave monumental displays of pain and brutality as one would associate with more action-driven Westerns but in a dramatic narrative that focuses on a father, mother, and son and all those around them, most of them living in a nearby small town.

It was Mortensen’s second attempt to work as a director after the contemporary family drama Falling, which is about Americans before and during the Civil War. “The Dead Don’t Hurt” has typical devices of the genre, but they did not want to stay in the framework of the usual.

We meet a sadistic lover of black who behaves like a psychopath, a couple of rich musclemen who practice their power in some southwestern town, a soft sheriff with a golden heart and a strong wife, an innocent son, and other stereotypes that many will find familiar to the films made during this period in US history. But there are no holdups of the stagecoaches or trains, no quick draws at the noon hour, no extended gun fights, not even an ocean of explosive dynamite. True, there is violence but of various kinds and it’s violence that is portrayed soberly and without embellishment, but without such elaboration as to make one feel that the movie is relishing violence. The tempo is what would be called “slow” by people who dislike the movie and “deliberate” by those who would enjoy the film.

In Warmers… Mads Mikkelsen features in the award-winning movie as Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant forced to settle down in the American West where he becomes the sheriff. He seems to have an important settlement in a cabin located in a canyon somewhere. I wouldn’t give away the start and end of the picture because the narrative is in a non-linear form. Trying to parcel out facts linearly would not only present an inaccurate representation of the film but also betray its several highs. Let’s just say that Holger travels to San Francisco, meets a flower seller from France named Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) and thereafter takes her back to his house. She soon reconciles herself with the fact that his house is rather basic and tries to create a home for the couple and the child they expect to have in the future.

Nonetheless, the picture also goes back to the outlined town, which has an arrogant businessman Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), his reckless and spoiled son Weston (Solly McLeod) and their mayor, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston), who is rich in real estate, the bank and most of the area.

There is some turmoil regarding the ownership of a saloon run by an eloquent manager called Alan Kendall, played by W Earl Brown. The saloon is won by the Jeffries family after a skirmish shown at the beginning of the film. Vivienne gets a job in the saloon. Weston develops an infatuation with her and does not take being told to go without her kindly.

I said it once and I’ll say it again, this is not a linear narrative. There are no clear cut cause-effect relationships to be found here. The story structure demands some getting used to. The Schoonover’s Fiddling Casualties script makes some definite choices and subverts the usual functioning of the moviegoing brain. He begins with what is effectively the end of his story and structurally, as required, moves back into various parts of the past. Such shifts are not organized around plot or even theme. They feel as natural as brushstrokes on a canvas.

Childhood sequences of Vivienne’s life are also shown where she sees the tragic loss of her father during the war with the English. This loss takes her to an Imaginarium of sorts, where she envisions an armored knight riding through the woods. The connection is made in the middle of the movie, which ends with Holger’s decision to join the Union army and fight against slavery for the enlistment money, thereby leaving Vivienne alone in the little house in the gorge.

Many modern viewers may regard this act as stable heartlessness, however, it was a very familiar occurrence back then and often appears in family trees with the statement, ‘He went to serve the army and returned after a year,’”

It is apparent that the writing and acting of all of the characters was intentional and sane. You have a sense of a rounded human being who may do not appear on screen so often as the character of Brown who delivers a few carefully selected lines, where he is too in love with himself to the point of embarrassment after he bulldozes several people in conversation, or where Ray McKinnon plays a judge who is trying a man wrongly accused of terrible crimes and who behaves as though his hammer is controlled by a higher being, and going berserk with it like a bulldog biting on a pistol grip, or Getz the actor playing a reverend who is required by circumstance to take charge over and execution of a community member for any reason.

(Brown, Dillahunt and McKinnon were all on the HBO Western “Deadwood,” the default typecast of actors for such projects; it’s pleasurable seeing them more or less submerged in very unlike roles that they have previously played.)

So none of the characters belly themselves in the manner that you expect them. Holgar for instance appears first as sort of a strong Clint Eastwood type figure, but Cooper is more capable, more earnest and more educated, and not so much a man of action. We often catch glimpses of him immersed in fiction or practicing his calligraphy on parchment sheets. He has a doting affection for his boy Little Vincent (Atlas Green), who isson of vivienne, that manages tenderness and physical contact not often seen in men in such films. So too is Degan and his version of ‘clutching and doing what a man’ has one other implication ‘which you have to no matter what ‘. Olsen does things that one imagines will earn her a lot of flack during focus group preview screenings (hard to imagine Mortensen doing one) for not being, well, quite the action hero’s set of behaviors at all. It’s more like how a real person with a more complicated mind would behave, and how he would have regrets over those actions later.

However, Krieps who had her break out role in “Phantom Thread” is the actual lead of this film despite the fact that it is preceded and followed by his character mortensen going on the epic quest in the movie.

She is the sole character who has flashbacks and dreams. She succeeds at portraying her character as brash, tough and confident while at the same time chronology wise never becomes irritatingly ‘feminist’ as many script writers of period dramas tend to create female characters of past eras. However, in spite of the fact that she doesn’t boast about how she employs the technique, Krieps is a number one cine star of a huge caliber possessing depth in her work as many acting legends including Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman. She resonates with her audience, which is impossible to see when she tries to maintain a facade of firmness during excruciating circumstances over which she has no control. But there is resolve in her when she strategizes about how to make the best of the bleak circumstances, and there is that excitement in her when she is valued and treated as such.

Not many filmmakers captured emotions as these depicters did, but when one does, as in the instances of the films ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ directed by Sam Peckinpah, Will Penny starring Charlton Heston, ‘Deadwood’ and the film ‘The Emigrants released in the 1970’s, one stands out because it seeks to emphasize significant character interactions devoid of a 20th or 21st century context instead of focusing on the high points typical in the genre’s construction. Because the story is set in the period ‘back then’ there is no need to cater for sensitivity towards their contemporary audience tastes so the characters are always a step away from us in all the scenes. So, yes, there are some things that have always been the same, but they never wear the same character, its all about the way people see themselves and each other at different ages, and this is a very good film because it understands that.

In addition, the film has a nice pacing because it knows when to dwell on a scene and when to cut from it or imply that something has happened off-screen. Most of the longer scenes involving the two protagonists are about them in romantic situations, and although they have witty exchanges, most of their interaction is looking at each other in anger, longing, appreciation, or disappointment. When it comes to movies based in the American west, similar scenes are almost unheard of. Or any film for that matter.

Currently, Mortensen is 65 and three years older than Eastwood was during the making of the film “Unforgiven” and now the western genre in the entertainment industry has no significance compared to over three decades ago, hence, it is hard to envision him directing more western films. Nevertheless, if he ever made Westerns, he would perhaps become one of the best interpreting the genre.

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