‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ Review: Viggo Mortensen’s Western About Women And The American Frontier
Western movies typically promote myths around the American frontier, and yet Viggo Mortensen’s “The Dead Don’t Hurt” has no interest in feeding into this mythology. Rather, it repurposes the frontier as a backdrop for a story about a woman trying to find her strength and power in a world ruled by men.
Mortensen wrote and directed “The Dead Don’t Hurt.” He also developed the music for the film and stars as the male lead character, Holger Olsen, a loner and a Danish immigrant.
The screenplay unfolds in a nonlinear manner with two parallel threads from the past and present. At least thematically, the threads converge during the final act of the film.
Mortensen opens the film with a shot of the French woman named Vivienne (Vicky Krieps) on her deathbed. It is unclear what made her sick, and Holger sits at her bedside holding her hand. Vivienne has a vision of what appears to be a knight in shining armor. With Holger’s back to the camera, the shot pulls away while Vivienne takes her last breath.
A thug named Weston (Solly McLeod) goes on a “bender” and kills several people, including the deputy sheriff. He is the son of Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), who is essentially a cattle baron in the town of Elk Flats, Nevada.
The juxtaposed death of Vivienne and the murders of the townspeople, with a dead body lying underneath the movie title, set the tone for Mortensen’s somber tale.
Flashing back, we see the moment when Vivienne catches Holger’s eyes while in a San Francisco market. She agrees to travel with him to his home, which is on the outskirts of Elk Flats. Immediately, Vivienne feels the isolation and complains about the cabin, which has no trees or flowers. She calls it a “bandits’ hideout.”
The desolate location is of particular consequence when Holger volunteers to fight slavery as a Union soldier in the American Civil War. Vivienne openly resents the fact that Holger is leaving her.
Although subdued, Mortensen deconstructs the western through several scenes that meditate on violence — including gender-based violence. One of the first scenes set in the past features Vivienne as a child. She asks her mother, “Why do men fight?” Her mother tells her that “it’s complicated to explain,” and, “They have their reasons.”
That helps the audience understand why Vivienne is frustrated with Holger after he enlists with the Union. It makes little difference to Vivienne that the cause may be righteous. The Civil War is yet another instance in her life where men are fighting (and spilling blood to solve problems that they have created in the world).
The deep corruption in Elk Flats is shown through the town’s mayor (Danny Huston) and the cattle baron as well as a scene of frontier justice. Elites easily get away with profiteering and malpractice by invoking religion.
Like director John Ford, who developed the American western, there are plenty of wide open spaces in “The Dead Don’t Hurt.” The spectacular views that cinematographer Marcel Zyskind creates help to justify the movie’s slow and steady pace, and Mortensen sometimes encourages the audience to scan the frame for details rather than telling viewers where exactly to train their attention.
Somehow “The Dead Don’t Hurt” has a serenity to it that makes it pleasant to watch. That can largely be attributed to the tenacious performance of Krieps as Vivienne, who plays the character with steadfastness and grace.
Krieps is best known for her performance as Alma in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” (2017), and though one might watch “The Dead Don’t Hurt” for Mortensen, Krieps carries the film.
During an interview for Deadline, Krieps said that the film was about the “female wound.”
“As women, we carry a wound or scar. That’s not from us. It’s from the women before and before and before us,” Krieps asserted. “But we can’t deny that we have it. And now the problem is that we have been taught to shut up and be quiet about it and be nice and smile and make a happy face.And women have been doing that over centuries, which made it harder for the other side, which would be the men, to even understand what is going on.”
“To feel the wound, and to be able to empathize. And I think only when the women show the wound honestly, the men are able to connect. And then you have a dialogue, and then you can heal together.”
By the time that the mystery of Vivienne’s fatal illness is revealed, the story honors the sheer power of her defiance through the actions that Holger takes to maintain his devotion. Because Holger regrets the fact that he did not empathize more with Vivienne.
It would be easy to call “The Dead Don’t Hurt” a kind of anti-western, given that this is what Krieps and Mortensen want audiences to take away from the movie. It only has two sequences with shoot-outs or showdowns. Except the film embraces many tropes from the western genre.
The difference between Mortensen’s western and a western by Ford or Howard Hawks is that it has much more ambiguity and invites us to interpret the meaning of life on the American frontier and how the past reverberates in the present.
