“Slow West” (2015)
When you watch a Western, you have to slow down. All allegiance to the modern world must be suspended.
Disconnect from the constant stream of information and overall connectivity for an hour or two. We need to imagine an environment without the constant noise of modern life. No skies without planes, roads without asphalt, hills without utility poles, and noise so omnipresent that we barely notice it.
This proves to be very therapeutic. The spectacle of our time – monotonous work – will disappear. Gun smoke fills the air as you are transported into the scorching climate of an unknown desert, the quiet stillness of a deserted lake, or the suffocating heat of a stagecoach surrounded by outlaws. Masu.
I don’t see much discussion about non-binary pronouns among people who could die from so-called tummy bugs at any time.
It used to be simpler, but it’s not an ode to simplicity. Due to the daily harshness of slave life, people had no other choice. So what you often see on the screen is a type of submission. Will it get stronger or will it get sour?
Guided by “drift”
Filmed primarily in New Zealand, “Slow West” is full of delicate artistry designed to slow you down. It’s a movie about being led adrift, as one of the protagonists likes to say.
That doesn’t mean it’s boring. “Slow West” is layered, taking a postmodern approach to chronology familiar from films like “Memento” and “Pulp Fiction.” But “Slow West” prioritizes beauty in a different way than those films, filling each frame with an exquisitely shot vision of nature.
“Slow West” is a creative and daring love story filled with angels and demons, death and magic. The film captures the outlaw circuit of the wild west, on the fringes of society, and is told with a hint of magic realism.
That last quality is evident from the first scene in which young Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) shoots up constellations in the blink of an eye, followed by a poetic rambling about a future with a railroad to the moon. The story continues.
We too feel the myth. The opening narration sets the scene as if telling a legend from a long time ago. “Once upon a time, in 1870 to be exact, a 16-year-old boy traveled from the cold lands of Scotland to the burning heart of America to find his life. Love. His name was Jay. Her name was Rose.”
Literary artistry and playfulness in word choice (“Scotland’s ruthless shoulders and America’s baked heart”) place you in noble territory from the get-go.
The little story at the beginning is as Western as it gets. But like most great westerns, “Slow West” goes far beyond the trappings of the genre.
Sometimes it’s downright psychedelic. But it’s in a newer, sharper way than, say, Jim Jarmusch’s acid western Dead Man, which I’ll explore in the near future. Every sensory channel is heightened to a pleasurable tension.
ghosts and surreality
This incredibly visceral film is highly abstract, almost surreal. It might be better to call it hyperreality.
This is part of what we get from modern Westerns: sharper, deeper, bloodier, louder, uglier re-imaginings of the West.
Compare the special effects of a movie like “Big Jake” to the unflinching brutality of “Slow West.” In “Big Jake,” when a man is shot, he jumps to the side screaming, clutching neon red paint smears. In “Slow West,” the murder is shown in his 4K as a gory visceral punch.
It’s also a disturbing movie. A ghost appeared. It’s like there’s a ghost in the room. A world full of ghosts.
Things and people just appear. Like Payne, he’s an eccentric villain with roots in Richard Boone and Lee Van Cleef. Or his foil, Jay’s mysterious traveling companion Silas Selleck, played by the talented Michael Fassbender.
Cyrus takes Jay to the desert. His intentions become unclear, then clear, then vague, then unclear again, and then largely destroyed. It’s never certain whether he’ll follow or lead, but there’s no doubt he knows the land and could play Virgil to Smit McPhee’s Dante.
This becomes most clear when the duo find themselves on the edge of wooded darkness and are about to enter a forest called the “Silver Ghost”.
“The legend is that people go in and don’t come out,” Cyrus tells Jay, who ends up bearing at least one of the five wounds of Christ.
There is always a danger that this kind of relaxed mysticism will devolve into pretentious hokum. But somehow “Slow West” manages to pull it off. The film recognizes itself as a Hollywood Western without sacrificing the underlying power of its images.
Midway through “Slow West,” villains and hostages alike gather around a campfire and debate the merits of outlaw fame. They are society’s most famous non-participants. The greatest lava swimmer in Hell.
The setting is a world where Satan actually defeated Christ. A wasteland filled with hatred and murder. But there are occasional glimpses of light, like a beautiful dream in which Silas spends his time in marital bliss in a small house, which is later recalled at the oddly phrased behest of his antagonist Payne (Ben Mendelsohn). “Kill that house!”
Angels and Demons
Human drama has been around for a long time. desire. To deceive. Frenzy. greedy. murder. But Slow West also proves the literary power of human relationships in Westerns.
“Slow West” reveals the philosophical depth of love and its potential in art. This is no easy task. It’s about using one of the most masculine film genres to poetically explore the most tender human reality.
Fragments of Jay and Cyrus’ innermost thoughts are narrated in a way reminiscent of the poetic narration of “The Thin Red Line,” highlighting their tension and fragile partnership.
“There are only a few of us left. Men above the law. But the most dangerous are the last to fall.”
It’s artistic and even academic, but it’s also funny.
Consider the interaction between Jay and Cyrus when they encounter an axe-wielding skeleton trapped under a fallen tree.
“Charles Darwin talks about evolution by natural selection.”
“For our sakes, let’s hope he’s wrong.”
However, hostility on the frontier never completely disappears. The Darwinian conversation continues as Silas muses ominously as he shaves Jay’s thin beard with a deer knife. It’s about knowing when to lash out and when to shut up. When to hit, when to hit? ”
Then German sociologist Werner (Andrew Robert) mysteriously appears on the barren land, depicting “the decline of the indigenous peoples in hopes of preventing their extinction and conversion to Christianity.” (Hahaha.)
Werner is a really great character. He’s interesting. He is charming, kind and witty. Multifaceted. But is he a mystic and an atheist? Although he looks like a happy blessing, he could easily be a fallen angel, a cursed one.
Does his acceptance mask an expedient relativism? Or is he a Christ-like Savior whose non-judgmental approach is a gesture of grace?
Is he serious or mischievous? The language here is also not poetic. This is the story of a fallen angel and a resurrected demon, trapped in an endless dream of hell.
With Werner’s appearance, “Slow West” established itself as a philosophical masterpiece that finds eternal truth in its short running time. “In a short period of time, this will be a thing of the past,” Werner said.
“Slow West” is currently available on all regular streamers.
