“The Dead Don’t Hurt” is a tender love story and a subversive western

One of the many attractions of The dead don’t hurt is that you can’t immediately tell whether it’s an old-fashioned or a revisionist Western. There are many familiar genre features: men riding on horseback through rugged landscapes, a bloody shootout in a saloon, and two actors, Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps, who bring traditional movie-star charisma to a tender love story.

But at times the film seems casually subversive. The first rider we see is not a cowboy but a knight in shining armor – a figure from a child’s fantasy dreams. And then there’s the way the film plays with time: the shootout that should take place at the end of the story is instead shown at the very beginning.

Mortensen, the film’s writer and director, believes we know the Western well enough by now to be able to experiment with the form without losing our attention. He doesn’t try to radically reinvent the genre, but he uses its conventions to tell a different and politically relevant kind of story.

What’s particularly significant is that the two main characters are immigrants. Mortensen plays Holger Olsen, a wandering Danish carpenter who finds himself in 1860s San Francisco. There he meets Vivienne, a French-Canadian florist, played by Krieps, who is just as independent as he is.

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Shout! Studio

The two fall in love, and Vivienne moves with Olsen to a dusty Nevada town called Elk Flats. Since the story is told out of order, we already know something bad is about to happen to them, but for now the mood is lighthearted and even comical, as Vivienne sullenly sets about cleaning up her wooden cabin.

Not suited to domestic confines, Vivienne soon gets a job as a bartender at the pub, where she attracts the attention of one of the nastiest customers in town: Weston Jeffries, played by Solly McLeod, the brutal son of a wealthy rancher. Meanwhile, with the Civil War raging, Olsen decides to join the Union Army, sparking Vivienne’s anger.

One of the best things about The dead don’t hurt is that it celebrates Vivienne’s courage and skill while acknowledging how alone and vulnerable she is in this hostile, male-dominated environment. A few months after Olsen’s departure, Vivienne gives birth to a baby boy under mysterious circumstances. Years later, Olsen returns to Vivienne and the child, but it is not an entirely happy reunion, and they face a grim reckoning with the city and some of its most corrupt individuals.

Mortensen made his directorial debut with the drama Fallin which he played a gay man trying to take care of his sick, bigoted father. With The dead don’t hurthe uses a story from the past to comment on issues that still concern us today, from male violence against women to the complexities of immigrants’ relationships with their adopted country. Even as Vivienne enjoys her life as an American settler, she proudly clings to her French-Canadian roots, sometimes dreamily recalling the stories her mother told her about Joan of Arc – an obvious heroine for a woman trying to find her own unorthodox path in life.

As a director, Mortensen handles the material with quiet assurance; even as he cuts back and forth in time, he never loses the narrative thread. He also delivers a gently grounded portrayal of Olsen, a decent man who sometimes makes impulsive, reckless decisions.

But ultimately, this is Krieps’ film. She has often played women who rebel against their prescribed life stages, in dramas such as Phantom Thread and corsageHere she captures the indomitable spirit of a woman who finds her way in a foreign land and is determined to find and cultivate beauty even in the harshest of circumstances.

Copyright: NPR