Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee (A24)Ever have somebody explain their joke to you? I mean, really sit down and linger over it to make sure you haven’t missed the point? That’s the problem at a key point in Slow West, director John Maclean’s feature debut.
From a low-angle, we see Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) and Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) looking over something they find amusing. It’s what news reports would call a grisly discovery: a skeleton of a man caught dead by the tree he was trying to cut down, axe still in his cold dead hands. To punctuate the punch line, Jay even notes it as a case of Darwinian natural selection. At this point in the movie, if man is to evolve into a species with sharper comic instincts, Jay should be cut down by another tree.
The movie is set near the end of the 19th century, New Zealand landscape passing for the American old west. Jay is a baby-faced Scotsman come to America to find his beloved Rose (Caren Pistorius), but on the way he runs into Silas, a drifter who gets Jay out of a jam. Silas, like nearly every adult character in the film, is a killer, but he agrees to help Jay find Rose, for a steep fee. Silas has ulterior motives, as there’s an even steeper bounty on Rose and her paw, and there’s a cowboy cat-and-mouse game as Silas tries to let Jay lead them to pay dirt while steering clear of other bounty hunters, including a gang led by Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), whose ten-gallon and fur look seems based on Bob Dylan circa Desire.
Like The Salvation, Slow West uses the old west as a backdrop for immigrant struggles. But even though the former is more gruesome, the latter is more obvious, seemingly unable to make a point without pistol whipping it through your Stetson.
Maclean has a good eye for landscape and a servicable rhythm for shootouts, but his characters have a tendency to scriptsplain. Smit-McPhee plays Jay like a naïve brat, and as Silas and the script helpfully points out, “a sheep among wolves.” However you may sympathize with the naïve part of his character, the know-it-all brat makes you start to side with the wolves.
The movie isn’t slow, but it’s not efficient either. An 84-minute film shouldn’t have a wasted frame, and a climactic shootout finally earns the film some genre stripes, but it’s too late. And that’s ruined too by a clumsy recap of all the dead bodies left behind, not just in this shootout but in the whole film. Apparently, violence is bad.
Slow West doesn’t stick around long enough for anybody to get bored, but it’s neither clever enough to be a good revisionist Western nor entertaining enough to be a satisfying genre exercise.
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Slow West
Written and directed by John Maclean
With Michael Fassbender, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ben Mendelsohn.
Rated R for violence and brief language
Running time 84 minutes
Opens today at the AFI Silver.
