Director: Viggo Mortensen
Stars: Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Garret Dillahunt
Mercy and cruelty are two sides of the same coin in Viggo Mortensen’s a-chronological and elegiac oater, a tale that eschews the conventional build and catharsis of a revenge narrative for something more novelistic and contemplative. Penned by the veteran actor himself, who also stars, directs and provides the plaintive score, its almost inevitable to draw comparisons to Clint Eastwood’s similarly inclined westerns from his mid-to-late periods. But where the likes of Pale Rider or neo-western Gran Torino still fueled themselves with the mythology of the unstoppable avenging angel, Mortensen evidences a more oblique, deliberately muddled approach.
With Mexico doubling for the tiny township of Elk Flats, Nevada, Mortensen opens The Dead Don’t Hurt on a series of seeming non-sequitors. A knight in full armor riding ethereally through a glen. A woman on what seems to be her deathbed, a lone tear escaping down her cheek. And the spilling out of violence at the town’s saloon, perpetrated by perennial wildling Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod) and pinned on his stammering, dim-witted brother. Mortensen’s quiet and gentle Holger Olsen is present at the mockery of a trial. But what’s his part in this?
The telling is unhurried, even drowsy for a time, though not without its minute-by-minute pleasures, and its in the gathering of these that Mortensen makes up for a conspicuous lack of narrative thrust. Jumping backward in time, we meet the movie’s real star, Vicky Krieps as headstrong French-Canadian Vivienne Le Coudy, drawn away from a boring romantic prospect by the craggy but kindly Dane, Olsen. The two tentatively start building a life together, and it is through these pragmatic steps that each’s respective character is revealed to us.
Krieps’ Vivienne is a great heroine in a prestigious lineage of no-nonsense western women, with as sharp a bullshit detector as a Barbara Stanwick or Marlene Dietrich dame. Evidently a Deadwood fan, Mortensen has corralled a mini-reunion, with the likes of Garret Dillahunt, Ray McKinnon and W. Earl Brown all bumping shoulders once more as stock characters populating Elk Flats. As one would expect, the pack put in dependably great character work. But it is Krieps who steals the show, even in the face of those gamely playing bigger around and against her. Mortensen’s screenplay pivots to her perspective, especially when Olsen gets the urge to fulfill his moral duty and join the Union army in the flight against slavery.
The Dead Don’t Hurt would have us think of the steady Olsen and the tempestuous Weston as opposites destined to clash, but perhaps they really share an inner pull toward the chaotic and violent, manifesting in different ways. Olsen plays his departure for the war like an intellectual exercise, but he is very much leaving a nurtured environment to deliberately put himself in harm’s way. Is it any less reckless than the feckless, spontaneous carnage that appeals to Weston?
The tragedy is that Olsen’s departure leaves an opening for Weston’s unpleasant and unwelcome advances to which Vivienne puts up a fight, but is ultimately outmatched. Gradually – and ahead of the pace of the film – we come to fully understand the revenge arc that’s been so splintered up by Mortensen. This very scattering seems to be Mortensen further taking to task the things we find satisfying about violent catharsis, questioning their value by removing their effectiveness. He frequently cuts around the most intense or problematic moments in his story, but their impact remains like a dry desert heat.
Come the end, Olsen’s way with mercy comes to feel decidedly, backhandedly cruel. In an effort to spare the innocent from seeing an act of murder, a far more drawn out and miserable fate is meted out. Again The Dead Don’t Hurt picks at the mythology of the avenging hero character, played doggedly against-type by Mortensen whose own script takes pains to switch up our assumptions of these imagined white knights.
The Lost Highway Hotel 