Viggo Mortensen reinvents the Western

What’s left of the Western? Apparently there are still plenty, as filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Kevin Costner continue to take this most venerable of genres in fascinating new directions.

The Dead Don’t Hurt – written, directed and starring Aragorn himself, Viggo Mortensen – initially seems like a relatively straightforward take on the genre. But like a bar card sharp, the film plays its cards slowly, making every look and gesture count as the stakes steadily rise. Moreover, its ambitious scope belies its status as an indie darling.

The tender romance at the heart of the novel is somewhat reminiscent of Heaven’s Gate and also of the hard life of European immigrants trying their luck in the western United States – where a very dazzling and sophisticated (and therefore American) power was already reaching out in the 1860s.

Mortensen’s Holger Olsen is an honest immigrant type – so honest that he even works as sheriff of Elk Flats, a small town in the dusty nothingness of the Nevada wilderness. When we meet him, he is being pressed into service by the town’s sleazy mayor (a predictably good Danny Huston), even though Olsen is still mourning his wife, who dies in the film’s opening scenes.

All of this is staged as the beginning of a tough quest for justice. But because of the film’s unusual – and sometimes confusing – structure, we understand it as the end of a longer, more complex story in which Olsen’s lost love is not a heartbreaking bookend effect but a heroine in her own right. Played with grace and toughness by Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, she is Vivienne Le Coudy, a French-Canadian flower seller who saves Olsen from a rich and boring suitor in San Francisco before he persuades her to return to his cabin in the mountains.