Wednesday Western: 'Slow West' (2015)

'Slow West' (2015)

When you watch a Western, you have to slow down. You’ve got to pause all loyalty to the modern world.

For an hour or two, detach from the stream of nonstop information and total connectivity. You have to imagine an environment without the constant racket of modern life. A sky without planes, roads without asphalt, hills without electric poles, and none of the noise so ubiquitous we barely even notice it.

This turns out to be quite therapeutic. The spectacle of our time — the drudgery — evaporates. Gun smoke fills the air as you’re transported into the torrid climes of some unknown desert, or the tranquil silence of an unbothered lake, or the smothering heat of a stagecoach flanked by outlaws.

You won’t find much discussion about nonbinary pronouns among people who could die at any moment from what we call a tummy bug.

It was a simpler time, but that’s no ode to simplicity. The bareness of everyday servitude left people with no other choice. So, what you often see onscreen is a kind of submission. Get strong or turn sour.

Guided by 'drift'

Filmed primarily in New Zealand, "Slow West" brims with subtle artistry designed to slow you down. It’s a movie guided by drift, to use a word favored by one of the protagonists.

Which is not to say it's boring. "Slow West" is heavily layered, with a postmodern approach to chronology familiar from films like "Memento" and "Pulp Fiction." But "Slow West" prioritizes beauty in a way those films don't, filling each frame with exquisitely shot visions of nature.

"Slow West" is a creative and daring love story full of angels and demons and death and magic. It captures the outlaw circuit of the Old West, the fringes of society, told with a hint of magical realism.

That last quality is evident from the first scene, as young Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) shoots the constellations into a wink — followed later by poetic rambles about a future with railroads to the moon.

We also get sense of the mythic. The opening narration sets the scene as if telling of a long-ago legend: “Once upon a time, 1870 to be exact, a 16-year-old kid traveled from the cold shoulder of Scotland to the baking heart of America to find his love. His name was Jay. Her name was Rose.”

The literary artistry and playfulness of the word choice (“the cold shoulder of Scotland to the baking heart of America”) places you in an elevated realm from the start.

That little opening story is about as Western as it gets. But, like most brilliant Westerns, "Slow West" is far more than its genre trappings.

At times, it’s downright psychedelic. But in a newer, sharper way than, say, Jim Jarmusch’s acid Western "Dead Man," which I’ll examine in the near future. Every sensory channel is heightened to a point of joyful tension.

The haunted and the hyperreal

This incredibly visceral film is deeply abstract, almost to the point of surreality. Better to call it hyperreality.

Which is part of what you gain from contemporary Westerns: a sharper, deeper, bloodier, louder, and uglier reimagining of the West.

Compare the special effects of a film like "Big Jake" to the unflinching brutality of "Slow West." In "Big Jake," when a person gets shot, they spring sideways with a yelp while gripping a neon red paint smear; in "Slow West," the murder is a harrowing gut punch in 4K.

It’s also a disturbing film. Haunted. Like there’s a ghost in the room. A world full of ghosts.

Things, and people, just appear. Like Payne, an eccentric villain with roots in Richard Boone or Lee Van Cleef. Or his foil, Jay’s mysterious travel companion Silas Selleck, played by the gifted Michael Fassbender.

Silas leads Jay through the desert. His intentions are unclear, then clear, then fuzzy, then unclear again, then broken wide open. Although we're never certain whether he’s following or leading, there's no doubt he is intimately acquainted with the land, allowing him to play Virgil to Smit-McPhee's Dante.

This is made most explicit when the duo find themselves at the edge of a wooded darkness, about to enter a forest some call "Silver Ghost."

“Legend has it, folks go in, they don’t come out," Silas tells Jay, who eventually winds up with at least one of Christ's five wounds. But are there any men of God in this movie?

There's always a risk that this kind of spare mysticism will devolve into pretentious hokum. But somehow "Slow West" pulls it off. The movie is aware of itself as a Hollywood Western without undercutting the primal power of its images.

Midway through "Slow West," villains and hostages alike gather around a campfire to debate the merits of outlaw renown. They’re the most famous nonparticipants of society. The greatest lava swimmers in hell.

The setting is a world where Satan actually defeated Christ. A wasteland of hatred and murder. But with occasional glimpses of light, like Silas’ beautiful dream of marital bliss in a tiny house — a house later recalled in a strangely phrased command by antagonist Payne (Ben Mendelsohn): “Kill that house!”

Angels and devils

The human drama is ancient. Desire. Deception. Frenzy. Greed. Murder. But "Slow West" also evinces the literary power of relationships in Westerns.

"Slow West" reveals the philosophical depths of love and its potential within art. This is no small task: using one of the manliest film genres to poetically explore the most tender human reality.

Fragments of both Jay and Silas' innermost thoughts illuminate the duo's tense and fragile partnership, in voiceover that evokes the poetic narration of "The Thin Red Line":

“There were few of us left. Men beyond the law. But the most dangerous are the last to fall.”

It’s artsy, even academic, but also funny.

Take the exchange between Jay and Silas upon encountering an ax-wielding skeleton trapped under a fallen tree.

“Charles Darwin talks of evolution by natural selection.”

“For our sake, let’s hope he’s wrong.”

But the hostility of the frontier never fully vanishes. The Darwinism conversation continues as Silas shaves Jay's meagre whiskers with a buck knife while offering some sinister musings: “Survival ain’t just ‘how to skin a jackrabbit.’ It’s knowing when to bluster and when to hush. When to take a beating and when to strike.”

Then there’s Werner (Andrew Robertt), the German sociologist who inexplicably appears in a barren field, charting “the decline of aboriginal tribes in the hope of preventing their extinction or conversion to Christianity.” (Ha ha.)

Werner is a truly wonderful character. He’s funny. Charming, kind, witty. Multi-faceted. Yet, mystical ... and an atheist? While he seems like a joyful blessing, he could just as easily be a fallen angel, something cursed.

Does his acceptance mask expedient relativism? Or is he a Christlike redeemer, whose nonjudgmental approach is a gesture of grace?

Is he earnest or mischievous? I’m not being poetic with the language here, either. This is the story of a fallen angel and a rising devil, trapped in an endless dream of hell.

Werner’s appearance cements "Slow West" as a philosophical masterpiece, finding eternal truths in its short running time. As Werner observes, “In a short time, this will be a long time ago.”

“Slow West” is currently available on all the usual streamers.