The year’s best Western that’s written and directed by its above-the-title star is, obviously, Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). I know Mortensen doesn’t have the decades of mega-clout that Kevin Costner has, but having sat through the former’s new film and the latter’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 all in the same day (it’s a living!), it’s clear which of the two has a firmer grip on storytelling these days. Both films are set in the Civil War-era West, and both show deference to the genre greats that preceded them, but only Mortensen’s keeps the run time and cast size in check, features three Deadwood alumni and maintains any sense of goddamn modesty. The Dead Don’t Hurt is Mortensen’s second effort as a writer-director (after 2020’s Falling), and shows that he has a good eye for visual detail and the wisdom to cast the incomparable Vicky Krieps as his co-star.
The Gist: Vicky Krieps dies in the opening scene of The Dead Don’t Hurt. Not a spoiler, obviously. Also obviously, a lot of the subsequent story is told in flashback. But we all bring baggage with us into movies, and what I’m bringing with me here is absolute certainty that Krieps will bring the motherf—ing pain as we work up to the death scene. We cut to a nearby town, where the execrable and all-black-clad Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod) guns down the saloon owner, the sheriff’s deputy and whoever else was the victim of the gunshots we heard echoing through the establishment. This guy is a real slab of piss, a notion we’ll assume right off the bat, and affirm as the film plays out. He’s enabled by his rich real-estate magnate father Alston Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt, Deadwood), and the oily mayor, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston), whose only interest is in kowtowing to the money in these here parts.
We meet Sheriff Holger Olsen (Mortensen) as he buries his common-law wife, Vivienne (Krieps). He places the wrapped body in the dry, dry earth and shovels, and their son Vincent (Atlas Green), who’s about four years old maybe, helps push the dirt into the hole. Heart. Break. Schiller rides up to Olsen and tells him about the murders, then orchestrates a sham trial overseen by similarly corrupt Judge Blagden (Ray McKinnon, Deadwood), engineered to send the town simpleton-drunk to the noose. Weston, you see, was “out of town,” so he obviously has an alibi. Bridge for sale. Bridge for sale. Cheap.
At this point, we need Krieps, and, thank whatever deity you worship, there is Krieps. Vivienne’s not dead, so we can do some math and assume this scene takes place a few years prior: She’s listening to an elitist blowhard snob use piles of multisyllabic words over dinner, prompting her to get up and get out. Dude isn’t happy about it, but she’s not the type to suffer fools, and he is indeed a fool. This is San Francisco. She lives alone, works as a florist, takes no guff. She walks near the docks one day and there’s Olsen, sitting alone with his Charles Bronson mustache. She walks directly to him and looks at him and he looks back and she smiles huge and we all but jump into the scene and push them together hoping to curb the electrical charge. No need, though. She goes after what she wants, and next thing you know, he awakes in her bed and she makes him breakfast. Not in bed, as he foolishly assumed. She’s too amazingly prickly for that.
Vivienne engineers a meeting between Olsen and the blowhard and the scene is great. We see flashbacks within the flashback, to her childhood with her French-Canadian mother, who taught her to idolize Joan of Arc. Makes sense. Soon, Vivienne and Olsen load the pack horse so she can move into his place, in a remote, quiet spot out in the country. On the journey, she shoots the duck he cooks over the fire. She’s independent. Resilient. Smart. Forthright. Honest. Herself. Herself. Herself. “Handy,” Olsen says of her. (He’s a carpenter, so he would know.) “Handy,” she says, grinning and putting her hand down his pants. Good Jesus Jenny these two are in love. Hell, we’re in love with her. It’s a playful love, and an earnest one. She scrubs up his bachelor pad and gets a job at the saloon, run by Alan (W. Earl Brown, Deadwood) and owned by – frick! – Alston Jeffries. Then Olsen does a thing that’s as noble as it is stupid: Joins the Union army. Again – frick!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Can’t help but think of Mortensen in The Road when Olsen saddles up little Vincent and takes to wandering the land in grief. Otherwise, The Dead Don’t Hurt is part neo-Western (Unforgiven), part classic Western (Once Upon a Time in the West is my go-to), part not-really-a-Western (think Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow).
Performance Worth Watching: In case you skipped ahead to this part without reading the previous, it’s Krieps’ performance that’s worth watching. KRIEPS’.
Memorable Dialogue: Olsen shakes his head after he realizes Vivienne set him up to run into her former blowhard beau:
Olsen: You’re a very bad girl.
Vivienne: That’s why you like me.
Sex and Skin: Brief female toplessness and a couple instances of what the old HBO guide used to call “sexual situations.”
Our Take: Mortensen is smart enough to not follow Olsen to the war, but rather, stay with Vivienne as she gets by on her own – and holds her own, all stoic, like she’s studied the standoffs in Sergio Leone films. The Dead Don’t Hurt is buttered on Krieps’ side of the bread. In a lesser film with lesser actors, her performance might be a braying anachronism, but in her hands, a strong, independent woman making her own way in the wildish West feels like a small miracle, a few steps down the evolutionary chain from Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West. Mortensen is appealing as the Danish immigrant, but it’s his co-star who’s the true catalyst of their chemistry, and it makes sense that these two characters would, could and should live out their rugged-individualist lives in a little dusty Eden alongside a gorgeous mesa, two days’ ride from Frisco.
As the opening scene tells us, though, that doesn’t happen. This is a quietly and deeply romantic Western, but it’s still a Western, with all the unease and violence that word implies. Mortensen shows no interest in simplicity, certainty or happy endings of mainstream films, opening with tragedy, then chopping up the narrative timeline as a means of generating suspense to the inevitable, and then to another inevitable, the type of inevitable that makes so many Westerns tick.
The film is as traditional as it is nonconformist, a fine-tuned balance of immediacy (the magnetism of the protagonists, the charisma of the supporting players) and eccentricity (there’s no traditional arcs here; Vivienne has no interest in marriage, and Olsen accepts that), of poignant, never-manipulative heartbreak and subtle, intellectually provocative ideas. Despite the flashback/forward structure, the film is never confusing, Mortensen carefully piecing together the narrative until motives and emotions come into focus. Whether The Dead Don’t Hurt is a revisionist Western or a feminist one or one with Something To Say – it’s all of the above, a quiet treatise on men and women and Americans and immigrants and life and death – seems beside the point: It’s familiar but distinctive, and distinctively wonderful in nearly every aspect.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Dead Don’t Hurt proves the Western ain’t dead.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.