The wild, wild and very Slow West
John Maclean’s debut is an ironic, eye-popping and fun adventure
For his debut feature, writer/director John Maclean treats Western tropes like balloons, pumping them full of new life until they threaten to burst.
The result is undeniably eyepopping and fun, though just as constantly in danger of drifting away into great blue yonder.
Slow West is roughly the story of Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who has travelled “from the cold shoulder of Scotland to the baking heart of America” as Michael Fassbender’s tersely poetic narrator/ bounty hunter Silas has it, to try to reconnect with his teenage crush. She’s been driven to the mythic, capital-W West by an unfortunate accident perpetrated by her dad. Slight and slow, Jay is gradually disabused of his romantic views of both women and the viability of life on the trail by Silas, who travels with him partly out of concern but mostly for a head start on the $2,000 bounty on the heads of the people Jay is searching for.
Like Silas himself, the film never lingers in one mood for long. Plaintively romantic to absurdly comic to explosively violent in patient but steady beats, its built with the chaos and uncertainty of the frontier, for good and ill. Consistently surprising, it’s capable of drawing beauty even if not especially out of its starkest, most brutal scenes: the primeval shroud of smoke that surrounds a burned aboriginal village, the electric blue-and-yellow expanse a sniper sets his rifle towards, splashes of vicious red against whitewashed western walls.
On the other hand, its characters are never much more than simple tropes, aphorism generators given the thinnest veneer of emotion and drive. All the best of these go to Silas, who Fassbender plays as a gruff tour guide to the depravity of the west, loaded with attitude — “Let’s drift” is his standard way of saying goodbye — and quick with a gun and a cigar. “Dead or Alive,” Jay remarks on seeing the Wanted poster; “Dead or dead, kid” Silas explains. The worst case scenario is how things work around here.
Building to a very worthy shootout, the movie is mostly about how Jay’s world view is eventually bent to Silas’s, usually with some very pointed visual reminders. Sentimentality, here, is at best buried in the woods or left pooling on a trading post floor; everyone Jay comes across, from a seemingly civilized surveyor to his one true love herself, has left warm feelings back east. Jay is not what you’d call a quick learner, even though his lessons are easily telegraphed, but he does at least have a gorgeous classroom. The sharpest irony in the film is that a place so beautiful can spark such brutality in the men and women who live in it.