Felt to be old-fashioned, racist, and unbankable, Westerns fell out of favor in Hollywood for many years. Fortunately for those who’ve carried the torch and kept their My Darling Clementine Blu-rays clutched tight, the tide of taste seems to be turning. The biggest cause, or bellwether, is probably the popular TV melodrama Yellowstone — dubbed “Succession for red states,” though it has far greater viewership. Its creator, Taylor Sheridan, also wrote or directed the “neo-Western” films Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017). To top everything, Yellowstone’s lead, Kevin Costner, left to direct a four-part Western passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, whose first film “chapter” debuts later this month. (Skeptics predict the project will be a flop of Heaven’s Gate proportions; we’ll see.)
But the larger story of the return of the Western also has an odd tributary that runs, for whatever reason, through Denmark. Funny that the Danes, inhabitants of a watery Scandinavian country, should have such an affinity. After starring in 2014’s absurdist Patagonian Western Jauja, Viggo Mortensen, most famous for portraying Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings films, has now written, directed, produced, and co-starred in his own contribution to the Western genre, The Dead Don’t Hurt, about a Danish immigrant in frontier America whose decision to enlist in the Civil War has grave implications for his French Canadian wife, played by Vicky Krieps. Mortensen, born in New York, is Danish American, and the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has starred in 2014’s The Salvation, about a Danish immigrant to 1800s America who takes revenge on outlaws who kill his family, and last year’s The Promised Land, a quasi-Western transported to the Danish moorlands.
Perhaps there’s something in the water. In any event, The Dead Don’t Hurt — Mortensen’s second directorial effort after 2020’s Falling — is not a blood-soaked epic or stirring historical saga but something quieter and more meditative, with the film’s clunky title perhaps giving a sense of its earnestness. This somber, feminist-inflected movie seems most inspired by the small-canvas, big-emotion revisionism of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), Costner’s Open Range (2003), and the “slow cinema” of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and First Cow (2019), even if it can’t entirely escape Western tropes and cliches.
The Dead Don’t Hurt is an essentially simple tale about two intertwined people, with the story told in an occasionally confusing, nonlinear narrative. Mortensen plays Holger Olsen, who left Denmark after fighting in the brutal Schleswig wars to settle in a small town in the gold rush-era West. He has a dilapidated ranch and serves as the local sheriff. While doing business in San Francisco, he meets a pretty and strong-headed flower seller, Vivienne Le Coudy.
Vivienne finds Holger much more interesting than the wealthy but self-absorbed local patrician she’s been seeing. (A scene of a date with the patrician, in which he prattles on while never asking Vivienne any questions about herself, could partly explain why he’s dating an impoverished flowergirl, and also presumably speaks to a date experience that women throughout history have had.) Like Holger, Vivienne is reticent about her past, but we learn from flashbacks that her French fur-trapper father died battling the British in Canada.
A romance kindles between Holger and Vivienne and she comes to join him at his ranch. Vivienne’s horror when she sees his bachelor digs for the first time is particularly funny and poignant. The two build a life together. They fix up the ranch, and Vivienne gets a job as a barmaid at the local saloon. The saloon is dominated by Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), a binge-drinking, seemingly bipolar villain (he dresses, of course, in all black) who gets away with his acts of bullying and violence because his powerful land-baron father, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt, of Deadwood), is in league with the town’s corrupt mayor and banker, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston).
Just as Holger and Vivienne have achieved something close to happiness, the Civil War intrudes. An officer comes to town to recruit volunteers for the Union Army. Most of the townspeople jeer at the idea of risking their lives for the conflict. But Holger, despite Vivienne’s urgent entreaties, is drawn to serve. He leaves for the war — and at this point vanishes from the picture, shifting the perspective entirely to Vivienne’s.
She struggles, and mostly succeeds, at running their farmstead alone, but comes under the sinister Weston’s discomfiting gaze. One night, he attacks her. To say more is to give too much away, but The Dead Don’t Hurt is, in essence, an exploration of the consequences of that attack — and of Holger’s choice to risk the immediate well-being of his wife for a larger moral duty. In fact, Mortensen’s decision to absent himself from a significant stretch of the runtime is one of the film’s more commendable formal choices: The Dead Don’t Hurt is less interested in the Civil War than in what happened to all the women left behind — and by extension in the experiences of many women in many times and places. It helps that Krieps, who as a mostly-unknown Luxembourgish actress gave a tour-de-force turn in 2017’s Phantom Thread, imbues Vivienne with great inner life. Mortensen also gives a tender and understated performance.
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Mortensen’s second undertaking as a director is accomplished if flawed. The movie is slow, perhaps meaningfully so, and has an earnestness that can border on the ponderous. It also suffers from some stilted dialogue — film and TV writers today sometimes seem under the impression that people in older days spoke woodenly, without contractions — and I’m not certain that the multiple timelines are necessary. But it also benefits from thoughtful writing, acting, on-location cinematography, and editing. There are some lush, perfectly framed shots of cabins nestled in valleys of which John Ford himself would surely approve.
If the Western is back, then it returns in a more varied and less procedural form, with all the bad and good that comes with that experimentation.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
