‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’: Toronto Review

Dir/scr: Viggo Mortensen. Canada, Mexico, Denmark. 2023. 129 mins.

It’s not quite a “revisionist” Western. There’s nothing showily subversive or anachronistic about the telling of this frontier romance. But Viggo Mortensen’s handsome and engrossing second picture as director (he also co-stars), which is set, firstly in San Francisco in the 1860s, and then in a treeless patch of unpromising scrub near the small town of Elk Flats, Nevada, has a distinct personality that sets it apart from more traditional examples of the Western genre.

That personality comes predominantly from the central character, Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), a fiercely independent French Canadian woman who is determined, like the flowers she cultivates against the odds and the elements in the desert soil, to survive on her own terms. She is an equal partner in the relationship with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), and for a while they are happy together, until the Civil War fatefully separates them.

Mortensen’s his first film as director was the intimate, mainly contemporary-set father-son drama Falling, and The Dead Don’t Hurt is a step up in terms of scope, ambition and, one assumes, budget. Working again with DoP Marcel Zyskind and shooting in Mexico and British Columbia, Canada, Mortensen creates a striking sense of time, place and of the possibilities of these wide-open frontiers. The measured pacing and an overly generous running time might work against the picture, but for the most part, it’s a rich, rewarding and fully fleshed-out drama that should be of interest both to festival programmers and those looking for prestige arthouse projects.

This is by no means the first Western to focus on a female protagonist, but it is unusual in that most other examples, from Calamity Jane to The Quick And The Dead to the Emily Blunt-starring TV series The English, tend to focus on women who survive the harsh realities of frontier life by matching the men, bullet for bullet, bourbon shot for bourbon shot. But while Vivienne can handle a pistol, it’s her femininity that fortifies her against the rigours of the West. Visibly disappointed by Holger’s modest home (“So sad! You live like a dog,”), she sets about filling it with flowers and beauty. Her main weapon, deployed all too frequently since the West seems to be overpopulated by substandard men, is her crushing, outspoken disdain.

Although we first meet her at the very end of her life – Mortensen elegantly navigates the film’s tricky non-linear structure – our first impression of the woman in her prime is her boredom and irritation. A pompous blowhard of a suitor sits opposite her in an upscale San Francisco restaurant, holding forth. Exasperation vibrates in every fibre of her body. When she finally spits the word “Cretin!”, it cuts as keenly as any knife. It’s the kind of role in which Krieps excels – she fills Vivienne with a deliciously unexpected mischief, a playfully maverick counterpoint to the serious business of survival in the frontier country. Her relationship with taciturn, tender Holger is wholly persuasive, an oasis in an emotionally arid environment. When he leaves, out of a sense of duty to his adopted country, to fight for the Union, Vivienne finds herself in a place of real vulnerability for perhaps the first time.

Although the film could perhaps have been tightened up a little – whittling off ten or fifteen minutes from the running time certainly wouldn’t hurt – it’s an impressive achievement from Mortensen, who, in addition to writing, directing and starring in the picture, also composed its lush and rather lovely orchestral score.