John McLean (2015)
This first feature by John McLean is a meta-western or an anti-western or some kind of revision of a western that turns out to be even more boring than westerns in their heyday usually were. Slow West is short on the energy but long on the violence of the traditional horse opera. The climactic shoot-out is especially protracted and bloodily aestheticised. It helps McLean, who also wrote the screenplay, to create a final, startling montage of shots of corpses, resulting from this and earlier death-dealing episodes in the film. The body count is impressive: the viewer is reminded, in case s/he thought otherwise, that the late-nineteenth-century American west was a violent place. According to Mark Kermode’s Observer review, McLean has described Slow West ‘as “a European road movie” with “fairytale” inflections that is “mostly about young love”’. The starting point of the story does give it a ballad-like quality (as do elements of Jed Kurzel’s score). Jay Cavendish, a sixteen-year-old Scot, is parted from Rose Ross, the girl he loves, when her father crosses the Atlantic to escape the law. Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) follows the Rosses to America and embarks on a mission to find Rose there. Armed with nothing more than a guide book to the west, he encounters a group of former soldiers in pursuit of a Native American and whose leader threatens Jay too. A world-weary but mysterious bounty hunter called Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) turns up at this point, kills the baddie leader, and takes the clueless Jay under his wing, in exchange for money. They travel on across Colorado, with Silas aware and Jay unaware that there’s a $2,000 bounty on the heads of Rose (Caren Pistorius) and her father (Rory McCann). The Rosses have set up home in an isolated prairie house, which is the epicentre of the concluding gunfight.
John McLean is interested chiefly in composing mythicising images of the vanished west. He succeeds, with the help of Robbie Ryan’s lustrous cinematography, although, as with McLean’s exposé of western violence, you may wonder why he bothers: this landscape has already been mythicised to death. There’s one genuinely amusing visual conceit. At one point, Jay and Silas get soaked but don’t have time to stop: they trot on in their long johns, their outer garments drying on a line slung between their horses. McLean is also fond of pithy-verging-on-smart-arse dialogue, whatever the circumstances. At the climax to Slow West, Rose fires on whoever happens to get too near her home. Jay bursts in unannounced and, not realising who he is, she wounds him fatally. When Jay dies, Silas (also shot and wounded but he’ll live) tells Rose that the lad loved her with all his heart. With her father, her Native American lover, assorted bounty hunters and other antagonists all slain in the shoot-out, Rose isn’t so traumatised that she can’t deliver the well-turned riposte ‘His heart was in the wrong place’. Earlier on, Jay has tried to find out more about Silas, who reveals that his parents are in their graves, his father in Ireland and his mother in Canada. Jay then asks Silas, ‘What’s stopping you joining them?’ This may not be, in the existential territory that these characters inhabit, a ludicrous question but it comes as a relief that Silas responds as if it is and tells Jay to shut up. (Silas is shaving him with a cut-throat razor at this point so Jay isn’t well placed to argue.) It’s as if the people in McLean’s story had foresight (and there is at least one clairvoyant dream) that, 150 years in the future, the time and place in which they lived and died would be the subject of movies like Slow West so that it makes sense to talk fancy. I wouldn’t mind this if the characters had any life in their mid-nineteenth century setting but they don’t.
Kodi Smit-McPhee, who turned nineteen last month, has been acting professionally for ten years now. (His best-known film role to date was as Viggo Mortensen’s son in The Road.) Child actors, as they reach adulthood, are sometimes anxious to compensate for their past appealingness. That’s the kindest explanation of Smit-McPhee’s blank-faced, vocally challenged interpretation of Jay – it’s not surprising that Rose doesn’t recognise the boy who loves her. I liked Caren Pistorius as Rose, though, and it’s pleasing that, at the end of Slow West, the two best performers are just about the only two adults left alive. Michael Fassbender is several cuts above anyone else in the film. He has a couple of brilliant moments: the slight but strongly expressive shift in his facial muscles when Jay says that he thinks Silas is lonely; the odd, homoerotic charge that he gives to a drunken conversation with another bounty hunter (Ben Mendelsohn) with whom Silas used to work. I’m getting impatient, though, for Fassbender to prove again that he’s the major actor he was in Jane Eyre and Shame – both more than three years ago now. Since then, he’s given some fine and varied supporting performances (Prometheus, 12 Years a Slave, Frank) but I hope his upcoming lead roles in Steve Jobs and The Light Between Oceans – and Macbeth! – will deliver more.
2 July 2015
