Movie review: Slow West throws an axe at western genre

By Katherine Monk

Americans have never demonstrated any real love for the revisionist western. They crucified Michael Cimino for Heaven’s Gate, ignored Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank in The Homesman and recoiled from the darker strains of Disney’s The Lone Ranger, all of which questioned the accepted lore surrounding the frontier.

They may well reject Slow West for the same reasons, but unlike its predecessors, John Maclean’s feature debut doesn’t even try to access the Saturday morning lockbox containing Matt Dillon and his weathered vest and Robert Conrad’s clean blue Stetson. This movie feels foreign from the very start, even though we’re faced with the same scenery that once framed John Wayne’s hulking form.

Young Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has landed in the American colonies on a cupid’s mission: He wants to find Rose (Caren Pistorius), a young woman who snagged his heart back in Scotland, but fled the country after she and her father ran afoul of feudal law.

Jay is technically a member of the Royal Family, a man of title and nobility, but in the opening scene, we see him in the woods hanging on to the reins of his over-burdened horse. He’s caught in the middle of a spontaneous gunfight, and if it weren’t for the presence of a sharp-shooting stranger, Jay would be a magpie’s meal on his first day.

Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) is an Irishman who figured out how to survive on the American frontier long ago, and when he sees the tenderfoot looking so vulnerable and weak, his old world upbringing convinces him to help.

It’s an interesting class twist that runs all the way through Maclean’s highly entertaining, but also shocking, take on the Old West. Fassbender’s character is so obviously Alpha, yet he plays submissive to Jay because class distinctions are etched into his calloused soul.

The obvious oddball pairing brings ample humour to the mix as Jay and Silas butt heads and battle bad guys, but every time Maclean gives you permission to laugh, he follows-up with a sobering dose of random violence.

The myth of the American west is rooted in the idea that brave men with silver-star badges kept law and order and brought human rights to the untamed frontier. But the truth of the Old West is closer to the reality of the modern western world, where profit always comes before people.

Jay not only believed in the promise of the west, he also believed in the biggest con game of all: True Romantic Love. He’s a lamb among wolves, but with Silas playing sheepdog as his side, Jay has a chance at grabbing the golden ring.

And we want him to succeed because in this altered, amoral landscape, he’s the only one who remotely resembles a modern man. It’s a part that Smit-McPhee, with his lanky frame and porcelain doll eyes, plays to perfection.

Paired with Fassbender, who possesses some of the same features only in manlier proportions, the duo create a metaphorical binary that pits emotion against violence, class against crass opportunism, and love against self-preservation.

Fortunately, Maclean doesn’t want to showcase his cleverness at the expense of a fun ride, so he saddles up the horses and gives us a movie that gallops like an action film but speaks like Samuel Beckett, in postmodern snippets that seem entirely inconsequential but resonate at some abstract level.

Slow West is steeped in a sense of the absurd, as well as a deep understanding of “Americana,” which is why the movie feels so weird to watch.

Slow West is steeped in a sense of the absurd, as well as a deep understanding of “Americana,” which is why the movie feels so weird to watch.

We think we know what’s going to happen, but Maclean never plays to expectation. He blows away cliché like so many empty beer bottles at target practice, gleefully blasting our assumptions with every pull of the trigger.

By the time we arrive at the final shootout, set in a hand-hewn log house with fresh white timber floors, Maclean has already set up the powder keg and lit the long fuse – blowing up nothing less than the foundation of the American ethos, and the hallucination of a just society emerging from blood-soaked colonialism.

@katherinemonk

Read The Ex-Press interview with John Maclean and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Slow West director John Maclean and stars Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ben Mendelsohn.

“The America that we see in the traditional western didn’t really exist. I wanted to steer clear of that romanticism. But I was interested in tackling the fairy tale element of it all – which gives it this magic realism, dreamlike quality”

John Maclean

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