The Dead Don't Hurt

To the End of the World

or

"How Was Your War?" "Too Long. How Was Yours?"

 

It starts out very quietly before we see anything. The sounds of Nature. The slightest of breaths.

 

A knight rides through the woods on horse-back, a little girl waiting for him.

 

It is the last thoughts of Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps, she of Phantom Thread), French-Canadian florist/bartender/mother/cook/carpenter/pioneer-woman. She is tended to, watched over, then mourned by her common-law husband Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), Danish carpenter/soldier/sheriff.

 

Vivienne is dead. And the man Olsen wants to kill, Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod) has just killed five people at the local saloon, as well as the deputy sheriff of the town. He's the son of a local rancher, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt) and just no damn good. The mayor, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston, in a performance slightly reminiscent of his father), who has business dealings with the man can't have such a massacre go unpunished, so he informs Olsen, who is in the process of burying his wife, of what happened, and assures the sheriff that they have the man who did it. A rather dim employee of the rancher volunteers to take the rap, never realizing that he might be hanged to save the son's neck. Olsen turns in his badge in protest. He has work to do.

 

Being Sheriff will just get in the way.

Sounds like a "typical" Western, doesn't it? But The Dead Don't Hurt, written/directed/starring Viggo Mortenson*, is only familiar in outline form and goes about things quite a bit differently. Mortenson strips away the rituals of Westerns, the shoot-outs, the robberies, the culture clashes with Natives, the chases (other than a brief one), the courtliness between men and women, and shows us the bare-bones and foundations of building a life in the wilderness, where people by necessity are "gig-workers" making use of whatever talents they have to scrape a living out of the dirt. You have to be tough, resilient, and oh-so-patient to eke out an existence, using Nature but fighting it back lest it overcome you.

Mortenson's characters have depth. They seem to have lives off-screen when we don't see them, histories and, hopefully, futures. More is spoken across someone's face than from their lips. And as there is not one Native in the entire movie, it drives home the point that the country was re-tooled under the auspices of immigrants, bringing their pasts with them. The film even feels like a "foreign" film, concentrating on the small moments, lingering on the consequential ones, and the violent ones are over in the time it takes to stop a heart.

There is another aspect to it that I like and always have been fond of—it's non-linear, starting with the death of one character and telling her story in flash-back, but not in an obvious, telegraphed way. The only way you can make the realization that a jump has happened is in paying attention to Olsen's facial hair, starting out with a brushy moustache, and his later, post-Civil War scenes, with a full beard, thus relieving any distracting questions ("Gee, what did he do with the kid?") that will pull you out of the movie—as I sometimes experienced. There are no exclamatory time-stamps holding your hand and making things obvious, but merely relying on the images on-screen to tell the story, the details of which orient you in situ.

I like that. And it allows Mortenson to juggle the story-line in a dramatic way to allow the story to evolve and not be fronted solely by a love story and back-ended by a revenge plot. Time stretches, evolves, and we learn more in this structure than by a simplistic start-middle-end timeline. Things seem to matter more. The character of Vivienne seems to matter more, as she is the center around which the movie revolves.

And in this structure, the film feels more like a memory, a totem of the woman we see dying in the beginning. Despite her early demise in the film, we see her life unfold in the flashbacks, the decisions she makes, the things she endures. It's really her film and the character haunts it—like we're seeing it play out in the moment of her death. And the performance of Krieps is a wonder to behold, played out with restraint, choosing her battles, internalized, not being dramatic about it. Enduring. It's a cliché to say that it's an award-winning performance—it has to be recognized first, and to do that, people have to see it, and I doubt the movie will get the attention it deserves to garner her such acclaim.

Which is a pity. This is already one of my favorite movies of the year (it clicks so many of my "this-makes-a-good-movie" boxes, which run counter to the adrenaline-fueled roller-coasters that drive the weekend box office figures), and I wish people will go out to theaters to see it. It's a big screen movie—especially with the sound—and it will lose a lot on a small video screen, and—god forbid!—on a telephone. It's an appointment movie, where time needs to stop to appreciate it and take it in. But, we live in a different time and a different sensibility than the one portrayed.

More's the pity. But, the mysteries of The Dead Don't Hurt are still percolating through my mind, and it may take another visit to fully appreciate just how good it is.

 

I can't wait.

* He composed the music, too...and is one of the musicians who played it.  

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Written at the time of the film's release with a 2016 post-script

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Poor Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life,
Three children, they were brave;
But the dirty little coward
that shot Mr. Howard*
Has laid Jesse James in his grave

That's from the old song "The Ballad of Jesse James" which I remember from my youth, forever enshrining James and the "dirty little coward" Robert Ford in my memory. It was written by one Billy Gashade (who took pains to include himself in the lyrics, naturally) soon after the outlaw's death. As with so much in the Jesse James business, it is reflective of the myth of Jesse James rather than the reality. 

For instance (as the Ford character points out in the movie) Jesse only had two kids. 

The fact behind the myth was that Jesse James was a vicious little punk—racist, paranoid, just as capable of killing friends as enemies, and women and children in the bargain. And while it's true he did rob from the rich—his target was banks and trains (or Union veterans)—the legend that he gave to the poor only extended to himself and members of his gang. 

Besides, you rob from the rich because that's where the money is.

No one who sees Jesse James as a folk-hero, or seeks to profit from that image, mentions the mutilations he would perform on his victims. It kinda gets in the way of the "fun." Yet, folks in Missouri still talk of the history of Jesse James (I once stayed in a hotel that advertised he slept there), and there's even a feud going on about whether Jesse really did die, and there are folks who want to dig him up to check DNA evidence to claim family affiliation. The myth rolls on. The lies that were sold in the pulp-magazines during his life are still at work, and as the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance goes: "This is the West, sir. If the Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend." Even if it is a god-damned lie and the guy was a scum-bag.

It is the yin and yang of truth and fiction that suffuses The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but then it did in reality, too. The conceit of the film (and the book by Ron Hansen on which it is based) is that Robert Ford was a product of a pulp-western inspired hero-worship, that Jesse had his eye on the stories, too, and their mutual attraction and loathing of the truth behind it was the music to the dance of death they engaged in. Robert Ford was a nobody, and, in the film's words "Jesse James stood as tall as a tree." And that set up a love-hate relationship with the unstable hoodlum. "I can't figger it out," says Brad Pitt's Jesse to Casey Affleck's Bob Ford. "Do you wanna be like me, or do you wanne be me?" 

In the film, Ford doesn't know himself and the answer changes depending on his fortunes...and his fears. But as the cliche goes there's only room for one of them, and if there's no doubt that the strong will prevail, there is some question which one that would be. Maybe it will merely be a case of who is the least weak. Ironically, both will go on to greater fame and infamy.

Andrew Dominick's film meanders between an informative narration** spoken over landscapes beneath time-lapsed speeding clouds, as if Nature is careening to a foregone conclusion, while the figures take their own sweet time getting there. Dominick has a formalism going with those fleeting clouds and shots that are framed by a time-distancing diffusion. But it's very inconsistent, and rendered meaningless--no doubt due to post-production cutting by Producer Ridley Scott and star Pitt to punch up the pace. 

If it's not all Dominick wanted it to be, at least there remains some terrific performances all-around. Pitt is at his enigmatic best here, an unreadable half-smile on his face in all occasions. Sam Rockwell as Ford's older brother and fellow gang member gives another off-kilter performance that is spot-on. Along the way there are terrific cameos by Sam Shepard, Michael Parks and Ted Levine (and one distracting one by James Carville), but the stand-out is Casey Affleck. Affleck is every insecure, withdrawn kid who talks big, with a defensive smile on his face, and eyes that roll protectively up into his head when challenged. He's a train-wreck waiting to happen. And Jesse James specialized at trains.

If you're of a patient frame of mind, and have a taste for an unromantic West with heavy-handed irony then The Assassination of Jesse James is for you. But if not, it's a rental.

Narration: He was growing into middle age, and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. He installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evenings as his wife wiped her pink hands on an apron and reported happily on their two children. His children knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks. They didn't know how their father made his living, or why they so often moved. They didn't even know their father's name. He was listed in the city directory as Thomas Howard. And he went everywhere unrecognized and lunched with Kansas City shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattleman or a commodities investor, someone rich and leisured who had the common touch. He had two incompletely healed bullet holes in his chest and another in his thigh. He was missing the nub of his left middle finger and was cautious, lest that mutilation be seen. He also had a condition that was referred to as "granulated eyelids" and it caused him to blink more than usual as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified. He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies, nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to. He had seen another summer under in Kansas City, Missouri and on September 5th in the year 1881, he was thirty-four-years-old.

The view from 2016: 

I was writing less and faster when I did this and there are some things that are remiss. In hindsight, I should mention it's an early film, not only of Sam Rockwell, but a pre-fame Jeremy Renner, the wonderful Paul Schneider, and Garret Dillahunt, as well as brief cameos by Nick Cave and Zooey Deschanel.

But, I think the biggest sin here is there isn't even a mention of Roger Deakins, who did the cinematography. One thing that DOES stand out about The Assassination of Jesse James, besides its rather astringent presentation—narration over tableau/scene/narration over tableau—is the beautiful imagery Deakins pulls out of his camera, to the point where it's almost trying to create myth in its own manner, by the sheer beauty and care of the images, some even diffused at the edges to give it a "magic camera" feel. 

Deakins, the go-to cameraman for the Coen Brothers, Sam Mendes, and so many others, knows that the images will become as communicative as the narration in those tableaux and he has a great ally in Dominick (who is also a cinematographer, working with Terrence Malick on The New World) in achieving amazing images throughout the film, but none more so than when the world is still and actors are not having to hit marks.

Narratively, the film is still a bit of a mess, but a second look recently struck me how beautiful the thing looks. It truly one of the best examples of Deakins' work in a storied career.

* "Thomas Howard" was the alias Jesse James was using at the time of his death.

** The narration has its own problems. One is not too sure of its reliability. For instance, in describing Jesse it states that he had "granulated eye-lids" which caused him to blink excessively, though part of Brad Pitt's performance is a protracted concentration, where he stares but does not blink. Then, the narration goes all flowery on the subject "...caused him to blink as if the world was too big to take in for too long." The film has its own problems with truth and myth.