‘Damsel’ in distress despite Pattinson, Wasikowska
“Damsel,” David and Nathan Zellner’s follow-up to David Zellner’s delightfully strange art-house sleeper “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” (2014), be- gins with a tour de force scene in Monument Valley in which an old man of the cloth (Robert Forster), who has lost interest in the ways things can go wrong in the West, waits for a stagecoach to take him back East.
Beside him is a stranger
(co-director David Zellner) looking for a fresh start after the supposed death of his wife in childbirth (he says nothing of the child, the first of the many failings of the film’s screenplay by the Zellners). In a frenzied fit, the preacher strips off his suit and gives it to the stranger and runs into the wilderness to meet God.
There is also a scene in which a young man we will come to know as Samuel Alabaster (Robert Pattinson) clog dances in a joyous delirium with a young woman named Penelope (Mia Wasikowska).
Next, Samuel arrives on an ocean shore with a rowboat, a guitar, a Winchester, an ivory-handled revolver and a miniature horse named Butterscotch. He aims to rescue Penelope (yes, another Penelope requiring rescue) from her supposed evil kidnapper Anton Cornell (Gabe Kasdorph) and his trapper bother, Rufus (Nathan Zellner). Butterscotch is a wedding gift for Penelope. Samuel has also hired the services of a certain drunkard named Parson Henry. This is the person the stranger in the first scene has made himself into with the help of the old preacher’s suit.
Some have called “Damsel” a marvelous, comic deconstruction of the Western genre. You could see it that way. Or you could say it was a failed movie full of a mixture of Coen brotherslike “True Grit”-style colorful, old-timey expressions and non-Coen brothers-like anachronistic language. Half the dialogue should have been cut. I assure you no one would have noticed.
The half-formed, semibarbarous town Samuel travels to with Butterscotch, where he finds a saloon full of drunkards and madmen and where a man gets hanged for the crime of “skull-buggery,” is not really very different from any number of John Ford-devised saloons or the saloons of revisionist Westerns of the 1970s.
Samuel and the parson travel into the woods, where they run into Rufus and find a cabin where Samuel believes Penelope is being held against her will, and before you can say, “The Searchers” or “I’d like this better if Walter Brennan were in it,” the whole plot takes a wacky turn.
Some may find this wackiness endearing. I found it tedious, labored and marred by the aforementioned anachronisms, although the lush lensing by Adam Stone is an enormous plus.
Wasikowska is another asset because she always is, and it is a shame that her magnificent work in the real-life Australian neo-Western “Tracks” (2013) was not more widely acknowledged.
As Parson Henry, David Zellner is no Brennan by a long shot, nor any number of great Western character actors we have enjoyed. Pattinson, who recently worked with Benny and Josh Safdie on “Good Time,” adopts a high squeaky voice and the semi-comic demeanor and delusional world view of a picaresque hero for Samuel. But he keeps signing up to work with indie filmmakers who let him down.