(UK/New Zealand, 84 min.)
Written and directed by John Maclean
Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Ben
Mendelsohn, Caren Pistorius
 |
| Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee in Slow West. Courtesy Soda Pictures. |
The American West is a young country, but it’s no place for
young men. Rough outlaws, new frontiers, lawlessness, and gunslinging call for
seasoned experience and not for youthful idealism. The westerner is a seasoned
old salt (see: Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones) and the Wild West is a place
for sunsets instead of sunrises. Young Scottish whippersnapper Jay (The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee) learns the
lessons of the West the hard way in Slow
West, the solid new western from writer/director John Maclean. Maclean,
making his feature debut here after delivering great shorts like Pitch Black Heist, which one can stream here, provides a lean,
mean, and rugged western with Slow West.
The film deservedly scored the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance
this year, and this wholly un-American western takes a marksman’s aim at the
myth and lore behind Manifest Destiny romps of the genre.
This tale of the futile violence of western expansionism is taut and gritty as Jay rides across Colorado in the late 1800s to be reunited with his love, Rose (Caren Pistorius), who’s on the lam from Scotland after she and her daddy (Rory McCann) accidentally killed a man. Jay gets a taste for the reality of the West when he stumbles across a trio of gunslingers hunting down a Native American and informs their gun-totin’ leader that he simply wants to find his girl. “We’re all just sons of bitches,” is the man’s reply before he’s promptly shot in the face and meets an end that many a man will encounter whilst Jay heads west.
The bullet that kills the old cuss hails from the barrel of
the gun sported by Silas (Michael Fassbender), who promptly sees an opportunity
to earn some money and offers to escort (re: babysit) Jay and protect him as he
traverses the dry countryside for the first time. How gentlemanly and sporting
of him.
Jay and Silas get along well enough as men of different
minds and temperaments do in the Wild West. They ride single file (Silas
insists) and shoot folks in self-defence but never for sport. Neither one is
really a man for words, and the silence between Jay and Silas conveys an
unspoken code and honour for the things men need to do to survive in a place as
violent and rapidly changing as the stormy West. Both men also ride in search
of a woman, but their motives couldn’t be more different: Jay rides for love and
Silas rides for bounty, and nowhere between the two does one see the traditional
cowboy of the movies who’s both a lover and a fighter. Slow West doesn’t concern itself with the old ways of the western:
they’re myths and lies, anyways, and the stuff of American movies that don’t
get made nowadays.
What Slow West
does offer in the means of a traditional western is a spot-on feat of
storytelling. This thrilling action drama unfolds slowly and smarty, but moves
at an economical space that sharply uses it brief eighty-five minutes to
introduce some mean and surly characters with inclinations for violence and a
neglect for dental hygiene. Jay and Silas’s travels are marked by instances of
storytelling when their paths intersect those of other frontier travellers,
mostly lonely men looking for someone to share a smoke, a drink, and a fire.
One studious foreigner explains his fascination with the First Nations tribes
in the West that are being wiped out by the expansion of civilization;
alternatively, a standout scene sees an old man tell Jay a kind of bed-time
story in which said civilization is anything but civil. The old man speaks of
the American male’s growing mania for violence as the lawlessness of the west
expands with the farmlands and housing. The myth is that the gun makes the man,
and this arresting interlude in the film—a story within the story—speaks of the
futility of self-serving myths in which men and empires are made by violence.
Cut to the end of Slow
West in which Maclean explodes this notion with a spectacular and furious
gun battle that sees little valour or heroism. The parties of Slow West converge for this duel in the
sun, and deaths come fast and furiously with even the most important or familiar
of characters getting a cap in the ass from folks who should know better but
shoot first given the circumstances. Slow
West is violent and gritty, and, in the end, Maclean gives each victim his
or her own shot in a montage that chronicles an impressive body count for an
eighty-five minute film.
Slow West also
challenges the ideology of the West as both the leading cowboys take
unsuspecting turns in this climactic gunfight. One finds honour and the other
takes off his boots (literally) in a bold, tragic rejection of the violence
that always seems to be a means to an end. Smit-McPhee is compelling as the
idealistic young Jay, while Fassbender is quietly menacing as the tough
chameleon-like Silas. These strong performances lead the film with their silent
power as Slow West uses a cowboy’s
sparsity for dialogue. The film nevertheless feels a kin to the westerns of the
Coen Brothers with its sturdy characters, explosive violence, and wicked sense
of humour. One particularly funny visual pours salt on the wound of one poor
westerner, and the sight gag is black humour at its finest.
The star shooter of the film, however, is cinematographer
Robbie Ryan (who previously shot Pitch
Black Heist with Maclean and Fassbender, as well as features like Philomena and Wuthering Heights). Sunlight was made to be shot as gorgeously as
it looks here, and Slow West sits
comfortably with a fine canon of films like Tree
of Life, 127 Hours, and other films in which the sun looks
even better onscreen than it does in the sky. On the other hand, Maclean and
Ryan never mythologize the violent West with the attractive sunlight; rather, Slow West looks like an elegy and a
setting sun: it’s beautiful and bloody, stark and violent.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Slow West is now playing in limited release.
It screens in Ottawa
at The Mayfair on July 6 and 7, and in Toronto at TIFF Lightbox.
