Slow West (2015) is a Western made by first-time Scottish director, John MacLean. It's a surprisingly conventional genre picture with elements influenced by Jim Jarmusch experimental Western, Dead Man. The film has a well-staged action sequences and a clear narrative arc. The movie is mostly silent with action articulating the story -- as a result, there are some features of the narrative that were not clear to me. The acting partakes in the "strong and silent" style of 1950's Westerns -- indeed, the movie could be a picture made by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher around 1960. The picture was shot in New Zealand, the landscapes "down under" standing in for Colorado. A vast arid and brown valley under a range of glacier-capped peaks is familiar to viewers who have seen Jane Campion's Power of the Dog. Lush green forests and curious hoodoo rock formations of pale chalk standing above a verdant ravine are featured in the movie. There is not a single moment when the viewer is convinced that the movie was shot in Colorado -- every single landscape screams New Zealand although it's hard for me to identify exactly why this should be so. (It may be a residual effect of seeing these landscapes and forests in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.)
A taciturn youth Jay sleeps outside with his gun cradled in his arms. He has come to the American West to search for a girl that he loves named Rose. (We see some inconsequential flashbacks of Rose and Jay in Scotland; it seems that Rose (or her father) may have accidentally killed a man in Scotland and decamped to Colorado to avoid the consequences.) Jay runs into a bounty hunter named Silas who is involved in the massacre of some Indians. Jay and Silas travel together to a remote 19th century convenience store that happens to be robbed when they are shopping for provisions. Two desperate Swedish immigrants, a man and woman, are the robbers and they get themselves killed in the lonely C-store -- their deaths leave orphaned a ten year old girl and her blonde six-year old brother. Jay and Silas continue their trek, callously abandoning the helpless children. Silas has torn a poster from the C-store's message board offering a $2000 bounty for bringing to justice, dead or alive, Rose and her father. Silas decides to use Jay to guide him to the fugitives, presumably so he can kill them and collect the bounty. A man named Payne leads a gang of about eight mounted bad hombres who are also bounty hunters -- they may have been the desperadoes who massacred the Indians in the opening scenes. And to complete the picture, there is a guy named Hawk who has an elaborate sniper-rifle in a funereal black case also hunting for Rose and her Pa. Jay and Silas have various low-key adventures including getting stuck in a flash flood in which a mountain creek overruns its banks and nearly drowns them. Jay separates from Silas, mistrusting the bounty hunter's motives. He runs into a German named Werner who is, in fact, a parody version of a younger Werner Herzog. Werner sneaks off in the night with Jay's gun and horse. Unfortunately for Werner, Silas is lurking nearby and the bounty hunter appears in the next scene leading an extra horse and with Jay's firearms. It turns out that Pa and Rose are living in a shack with about 20 miles of empty space on all sides of it -- the shack is ridiculously isolated in a field of tall grass with oddly shaped tassels. Hawk laboriously sets up his sniper rifle to gun down Pa and Rose from a distance of a quarter mile. (I don't why he just doesn't sneak up to their house and kill them, but, by genre convention, he has to make use of his spectacular firearm.) At the shack, Pa and Rose are living under the protection of Kotari, a handsome Noble Savage straight out of Fenimore Cooper -- we see him bringing two rabbits that he has killed for supper to the shack where the fugitives are living. Hawk guns down Pa at long-range but, then, is shot from behind by members of Payne's gang. Jay has been tied-up for some obscure reason by Silas -- possibly to prevent him from stopping Silas in his efforts to kill or apprehend for bounty the two fugitives. (Plot summaries say that Silas ties-up Jay to protect him -- this seems implausible and unsupported by the film.) Payne's group besieges the hut in which Kotari and Rose make a last stand, defending themselves with flaming arrows, long-guns, and revolvers. The bad hombres are mostly killed but Silas gets badly wounded and is hors de combat. Kotari, before he's gunned down, lights the nearby grassfields on fire with his flaming arrows. After a pitched battle, the last of bounty hunters is shot by the badly hurt Silas who has switched sides and is now helping the good guys. Rose guns down poor Jay when he darts into the shack to save her -- she thinks he's one of the bounty hunters. The camera tours the casualties some of them burned up in the fire. In the last scene, Silas is living in domestic bliss with Rose and the two Swedish children who were adopted by Payne's murderous gang but are now living with the ex-bounty hunter and his wife, Rose.
The set-piece involving the siege of shack is excellently staged and, in general, MacLean shows skill with action scenes and violence -- a prerequisite for a director of Westerns. The movie has lots of portentous, muted dialogue and, at times, the film's portrait of the West as a place full of eccentric isolates, loners and half-mute immigrants and inscrutable Indians, reminded me of Jarmusch's Western. (A source for this vision of the West pre-dating Jarmusch is Kurosawa's very strange and ineffable Dersu Uzula, another Western set in Siberia.) The landscapes are spectacular and MacLean lenses them beautifully with tiny figures scattered across a vast wilderness. The movie is the length of an old Hollywood B-movie Western (like those of Boetticher and Mann) --it's about one hour and 23 minutes long. I liked the picture but not as much as most of the critics who were greatly impressed by the film and lauded it as wonderfully innovative -- it's good, but not that good, and will seem innovative only to people not familiar with Hollywood's lower budget Westerns made in the fifties and sixties, pictures like Mann's Bend of the River or Boetticher's The Tall T. That said, there's nothing wrong with Mann and Boettcher's Westerns which are satisfying in their own right and, so, nothing wrong with Slow West.
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