The Dead Don’t Hurt — the new Western directed, produced, written, and starring Viggo Mortensen, begins not with a showdown but a mounted knight in armor making his way through a forest. Then the camera cuts away — not to a showdown, but to Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), who is in the process of completing a mass murder in a saloon, then knocks off a slow-on-the-trigger deputy for good measure. These scenes are very much part of the story, and the film dispenses with linear plot in order to create a visual essay on the West, America, and nobility — both in terms of human independence and making spiritual deals with a strange land. (more…)
Counter-Currents