Salt and Fire is a Werner Herzog film starring Veronica Ferres as a scientist investigating an ecological disaster when her mission takes a strange turn. I am determined to watch every Herzog film, and Michael Shannon is a national treasure, but do not be me. Even at ninety-eight minutes, an impressive cast and an internationally talented director, it never comes together and gets more unintelligible as it unfolds. I am someone who watches long, silent, black and white, twenty-first century foreign films so if it is not for me, then who? Identify yourself and enlighten us Philistines because I do not get it except as a heavy-handed parable about the universal pure language of love in the face of man-made apocalypse.
I actually liked the protagonist in Salt and Fire. I did not recognize Ferres even though I have seen her before. I related to her character, especially how regardless of context and credentials, her character is always reduced to how others want her to be, generally in relation to her gender-a sexual being, a mother figure, demanding that she prioritize the subjective over the objective even though each course arrives at the same answer. In the end, it felt as if Herzog, in his desire to strip human beings of their pretensions and reduce them to their essence, feelings, ultimately disregards what makes her character a unique individual. I hate films that reduce the assassin, master thief, real estate agent, etc. to simply a mother figure or potential love interest. If you are not Pedro Almodovar, and as great as Herzog is, he is not, no director can credibly pull off the emotional destination that this character arrives after such a journey. It is insulting and reductive regardless of the filmmakers’ intention. Was there a single woman involved behind the scenes to make sure that this story did not get derailed?
Salt and Fire’s narrative structure is a mess. It uses the how we got here trope in which the film starts with a scene that happens later in the film, twenty-two minutes to be exact, so the first act is supposed to leave you breathless in anticipation to arrive at the destination. It is usually the red flag of lack of quality. There is nothing wrong with telling a story in chronological order. It leaches the tension out of a film if you already commence at the most sensational moment of the story. Also considering that this opening scene is a bit of a MacGufin considering the denouement, it feels like an added insult.
Salt and Fire is baffling. The introduction and removal of characters defies any logic in terms of making the story more interesting or credible. If you came for Gael Garcia Bernal, do not bother. He appears in the first act then briefly in the middle. Even though I have no preexisting attachment to Volker Michalowski, who plays Dr. Meier, I liked his plucky, polite character instantly and was quite furious that the film seemed to glibly forget him. People are the environment too. If you care about the environment and nature, you have to care about people, and for the protagonist to just be cool with everything that preceded at the denouement is to cheapen what she and Dr. Meier went through to get there. Just because the filmmaker made her the Smurfette does not mean that she is special and above her colleagues. As much as j’adore Shannon, his character and his band of inexplicable ne’er-do-wells felt more like performance artists or philosophers than ecological terrorists, performative hostage takers more interested in the spectacle than actually achieving anything. I would love to get the perspective of actual people with disabilities regarding one character’s affliction, which felt vaguely offensive to me as a currently nondisabled person. (Thank you to Judith Heumann, “I call you nondisabled, because the likelihood of your acquiring a disability, temporarily or permanently, is statistically very high.”)
In other vaguely paternalistic and offensive news, there was something mildly gross about how children are used in Salt and Fire, reduced to symbols rather than people, especially when they are natives to the land. All the characters are foreigners allegedly acting in their best interest and are central to the story, but why should they be the center of the story? Because they caused the problem or believe that they can fix it? If there were no native Bolivians in the film, I would not have considered this issue. These children are the only representatives of the people who actually live there yet they are silent and have no real voice or position in the situation. It is the inadvertent equivalent of infantilizing of the entire nation to get outsiders’ perspectives on what is actually happening to them. If you want experience, you do not need to import an outsider. While allegedly discarding dispassionate reason and objective, Herzog does not discard which people are considered credible witnesses.
Salt and Fire’s emotional tone veers wildly. When one person casually says, “Truth is the only daughter of time,” I actually wrote in my notes, “Come the fuck on!” I desperately cast about trying to embrace the deeper meaning of this film, but it tries too hard to get there. The movie is paralleled with a painting that Shannon’s character wants to see, and like the painting, we as viewers are supposed to arrive at different conclusions depending on the angle, our perspective, of what we are consuming, and he is right because by the end of the movie, I realized that all my straining effort was a complete waste.
Salt and Fire really feels like Herzog’s desire to film the landscape, but was too afraid to just make a silent film without people or dialogue, which probably would have made a better film. I love volcanoes and would have totally grooved to a film with Herzog randomly narrating about the area for ninety minutes over this mess. Definitely give me two Into the Infernos instead of this film. If he thought that I needed an artsy fartsy excuse for a thriller to get there, Herzog was sorely mistaken. He needs to stop making fiction and stick to documentaries if he is going to make a movie that bears little resemblance to actual human behavior, the best or worst of us.
Salt and Fire is not worth your time unless you want to go on a winding journey that actually gets you nowhere literally and figuratively. Shannon deserves an award for somehow still acting the hell out of a character to make him seem like a tragic anti-hero instead of a clumsy, presumptuous dumbass who keeps landing on his feet and will hopefully end up in jail after this absurd Rube Goldbergian contrivance that acts as an excuse for a plan to rectify his wrongs. Here is an idea: visit Rome before you execute elaborate ruses as an excuse to monologue about man’s folly. Ugh! I guess that the movie works if you are looking for a subversive depiction of Stockholm’s Syndrome. Skip it!