The Dead Don’t Hurt review – ele­giac and ten­der­ly romantic

Unlike some of his actor-turned-direc­tor peers, Vig­go Mortensen doesn’t see film­mak­ing as a zeit­geist-con­nect­ed pop­u­lar­i­ty con­test. With his wist­ful sec­ond fea­ture, The Dead Don’t Hurt, he mines a seam of time­worn Amer­i­cana, draw­ing on the sparse­ly strik­ing, often dead­ly land­scapes of the old west and a peo­ple whose col­lec­tive moral com­pass has yet to find its true north.

He plays light­ly griz­zled Dan­ish immi­grant Hol­ger Olsen, who we join at the moment he sets his eyes upon the corpse of his recent­ly depart­ed French-Cana­di­an wife, Vivi­enne (a typ­i­cal­ly ethe­re­al Vicky Krieps). Along with a young boy we under­stand to be his son, Hol­ger duti­ful­ly buries his bride while keep­ing his true emo­tions hid­den under his smock­coat – the actions of a man who has seen much death in his time.

Per the title, Mortensen’s film explores a per­pet­u­al sense of earth­ly suf­fer­ing that comes from the mere fact of exis­tence, yet that suf­fer­ing derives as much from a sur­feit of love as it does the being the vic­tim of oth­ers’ expres­sions of vio­lence. Flash­backs lap up against one anoth­er like gen­tle waves, as we dis­cov­er the con­text of this sour predica­ment, cov­er­ing lust­ful, black-clad sharp­shoot­ers, crooked bureau­crats, social dis­eases and the cat­a­stroph­ic fall­out of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War.

Vivi­enne is very much the cen­tral focus of the film, which is inter­est­ed in the endurance, integri­ty and inge­nu­ity she dis­plays while wait­ing in blind hope for the pos­si­bly short­sight­ed Hol­ger – a paragon of civic virtue – to return home unharmed.

At heart it’s an ele­giac and ten­der­ly roman­tic work, and Mortensen cap­tures both the rap­ture and the ambiva­lence of life dur­ing that era while not-quite-fit­ting into a WASP social pro­file. There are lots of rel­e­vant ref­er­ences to clas­sic era west­erns that feel appo­site here, yet it’s two 1990s Clint East­wood oaters that most­ly come to mind: Unfor­giv­en and The Bridges of Madi­son County.

Mortensen even seems to be chan­nelling Big Clint in a per­for­mance that is large­ly shorn of out­ward emo­tion and instead chan­nels the sense that an explo­sion of vio­lence is always just around the next cor­ner. The main antag­o­nist is Alfred Jef­fries (Gar­ret Dil­lahunt), a drunk­en lout with a very itchy trig­ger-fin­ger whose bloody trans­gres­sions are always cov­ered up by his father West­on (Sol­ly McLeod) and mous­tache-twirling local may­or (Dan­ny Huston).

The extent of their evil­do­ing is paint­ed in an ear­ly kan­ga­roo court sequence when the inex­orable wheels of manip­u­lat­ed jus­tice lead to a harm­less liquor-head being hung for one of Alfred’s shoot­ing sprees. Despite some pac­ing issues and the fact it leans a lit­tle to heav­i­ly on extend­ed visu­al longeurs, this is a fine sec­ond fea­ture from Mortensen.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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