In a perfect world at the very least one great western a year would be made, to soothe our yearning for the times when they did about 10, in a bad year. The last time a western was released The MacMahonian would qualify as great was back in 2010 (True Grit, Coen Bros). Slow West may be better.
Slow West is the 1st feature film directed by John Maclean, formerly of The Beta Band pop group, who also wrote the script and should give up his day (or evening) job and devote himself full time to directing, as with Slow West he has just stuck another nail in the coffin of my prejudice against musicians, architects, painters, writers, etc. who try a hand at the hidden side of the camera.
Slow West tells the story of Jay Cavendish (Kody Smit-McPhee), a young scot who goes west on a quest to find his estranged beloved Rose (Caren Pistorius), more or less accidentally teams up with a bounty hunter (Michael Fassbender, stealing the show) to help him get along in the wild new world. As it happens, unbeknownst to Jay there's a bounty on Rose's head, so it turns out the bounty hunter's assistance is not as disinterested as at first assumed… Considerable complications ensue and finally all ends sort of well, if only from the point of view of the few who survive.
To make a western cannot but be a challenge. What are you going to do? follow conventions? to be compared with Walsh, Hawks, Ford? try something new? what's that even like? Slow West manages to be both conventional and new. It is set in a nondescript beckettian western no man's land, (the landscape is noticeably western but, after the fashion of the spaghetti westerns of the 60s and 70s, which were shot in Italy or Spain, Slow West was shot entirely in New Zealand and Scotland), the protagonist's quest reminiscent of both The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) and Two Rode Together(ditto, 1961), with other celebrated Western conventions, e.g. fake preacher man and psycho outlaw posse, seamlessly blended in. The films point, besides wondering and entertaining the wits out of us, seems to be the classical American postulate to the effect that the US of A was made great by the blood, sweat and tears of generations of pioneers who braved the wild, but also in no small measure by the blood of the thousands who happened to be in a bullet's trajectory at the wrong moment for no particular reason or, as the film shows at one point, on the wrong side of a tree when logging. The (minor spoiler alert) final reconstitution and validation of the basic family unit which – apparently implicitly – made the USA of A great (although extant but not accomplishing the same in other parts, but never mind) is, like most of what else happens in the film, an unexpected but appropriate coda.
Slow West charts a territory somewhere between Bud Boetticher and the Coen Bros, one The MacMahonian didn’t imagine existed or was needed. That is art's job of work, to conjure and create new worlds no man had dreamt up before – or had and had just been waiting for someone else to come and create them. Slow West is probably the movie of the year so far. And another entry to the Line of the Year Contest: Jay: “there's more to life to surviving”; bounty hunter: “Sure, there's dying”.