I really don't like Westerns. A few exceptions:
- The old TV show The Riflemen starring Chuck Connors.
- The Emigrants and The New Land (early '70s), a pair of movies starring Max von Sydow & Liv Ullman as a Swedish family who settle in Minnesota in 1850.
- Heartland (1978), starring Conchata Ferrell and Rip Taylor, about a widow who goes west to manage a household for a taciturn farmer in Wyoming.
- The Unforgiven (1992), starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman (directed by Eastwood) except that the violence was extreme.
These Westerns focus more on families.
The same is true of Viggo Mortensen's second movie as a writer/director, The Dead Don't Hurt. While it is violent in places, the focus is on the family.
This movie stars Vicky Krieps (Vivienne), Solly McLeod (Weston), Danny Huston (Mayor Schiller), & Viggo (Olsen). The movie is loaded with immigrants from Europe - Olsen is Danish. Vivienne is French via Canada.
The Dead Don't Hurt starts very quietly. A woman, Vivienne dies, a man, Olsen, holding her hand. At about the same time, there is a shooting spree & a person is accused of the murders, tried, convicted & hung. Olsen lives nearby & seems wary about the verdict but doesn't say anything.
The movie jumps around and goes back in time to the childhood of Vivienne. She grew up in a cabin in Canada; her family don’t like the English. Her father disappears; the audience knows he'd been captured and executed by the English. The little girl Vivienne grows up to be a young woman in San Francisco. She’s with an upper class twit type but sees a man who introduces himself as Olsen. They chat & find out they’re both immigrants. They rapidly hook up. She goes off with Olsen into the wild. It turns out she can shoot, a useful skill in the wild. There’s a funny scene about how to have sex in the wild while wearing layers of clothes from the 1860s. After a few days in the wild, they arrive at property Olsen had leased. It’s in the mountains in a desert-like area & it includes a delapidated cabin and no garden.
The movie jumps between the "present," as Vivienne adjusts to living in the middle of nowhere, and the future, a trip Olsen takes after her death. The scenes in the town can be violent—-mostly due to Weston, the man who actually did the shooting spree near the beginning of the movie. He does every ugly, violent thing you can imagine. Some of the violence happens when Olsen has gone off to fight in the Civil War so Vivienne needs to handle things for herself.
The photography throughout is lovely; Marcel Zyskind is a Danish cinemetographer who captures the "splendid isolation" of so much of the West.
The production design is all very raw and western. One minor issue - western buildings at that time (1860-1865 for the most part) were a big mix of old and new construction, but almost everything in this movie looks old.
The music sounds like it was all played on old instruments evoking the feel of the place where the action is taking place--mostly old fiddles & a piano. Viggo also wrote the music & it works very well. Using old instruments like this was a good effect in two of John Hillcoat's movies - his western The Proposition and his dystopic The Road in which Viggo starred. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis wrote the music for the two Hlllcoat movies.
The movie was mostly shot in Mexico, with a few scenes shot in Canada.
I enjoyed this movie very much. The performances are all excellent, and the script works, though I have some quibbles around the climax.
