Slow West could have ended up in my queue for two reasons: Ben Mendelsohn or Michael Fassbender. If a finger symbolized a minute, you probably would not need an entire hand to count Mendelsohn’s screentime. His character has a shabby chic, thrift store vibe as he is in an oversized, ratty fur coat, holds an enormous cigar in his teeth and impractically walks around with two glasses to offer Absinthe in exchange for coffee. Coffee is life, but that still seems like an inequitable trade to me, and I am uninterested in the green concoction. You see him once before that and once afterwards so if you are coming for Mendelsohn, you better be satisfied with what I described and consider yourself warned that you have to wait forty-two minutes before you hear him utter a word. Under utilizing Mendelsohn should be a crime.
Slow West gives us more Fassbender. Though Fassbender is the narrator, the protagonist is Jay, a rich Scottish teen, in over his head as he goes West to meet up with the girl that he loves. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays him, and you should know him from Romulus, My Father, The Road, Let Me In, Young Ones, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: Apocalypse (Nightcrawler) and Dark Phoenix, but I bet you do not remember him. He has a distinct face so maybe it is a good sign because he is like a chameleon, but it is more likely that he is not the most interesting person on screen so he is easy to forget. I only remember him from Young Ones, and I was there for Michael Shannon. KSM does a serviceable job, but he is not first on your speed dial if that is still a thing. So if you are coming for someone else, you will be as disappointed as me to get KSM instead. Side note: when I saw Widows, I thought that he grew up and became Lukas Haas. “Yikes, he did not age well.” Nope, they are different people, but someone else must see the resemblance, right?
Slow West is at its best when it aims for visual humor to puncture the life and death gravity of this stab at a Western. If it had sustained that tone, it may be worth watching. Think the humor from The Office to show that tough gunslingers can bungle things too. The best scene is during the final epic gun battle, and I will not spoil it if you disregard my warnings to not see this film. I am going to preserve the best moments, and if I am recalling correctly, there are about three. The second one is a joke grenade so you have to wait for the punch line. It is like a Benny Hill skit without the gross sexual harassment punchline.
Unfortunately Slow West takes itself as seriously as the arrogant adolescent teen who believes that his love will sustain him as he crosses treacherous terrain to find his love. I did not like this character upon first sight, and as I learned more about him in flashbacks, he managed to further lower my esteem of him! It is possible to have an unlikeable protagonist and still become invested in the movie and his welfare, but not this time. I know that the character gives us an opportunity to compare and contrast his playing with the idea of death with the reality, but come on. I do not need to watch this movie to make that point.
Slow West is beautiful to watch, and I would not be surprised if John MacLean, the first-time feature filmmaker, started with the images then reverse engineered his way into the story, but I am still going to need a story, dog. People complain about the fact that the film was shot entirely in New Zealand and Scotland, not the U.S. Hey, if Lars von Trier can do it, why not? It will not be the first Western not shot in the West. It felt as if Jeremiah Johnson, Werner Herzog and inspired MacLean, but I did not come to look at MacLean’s vision board. I enjoyed how MacLean made the West feel filled with immigrants. I appreciated that women are casually just as dangerous as men. I have no idea if it is historically accurate to depict the European immigrants as sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans. It felt more like a post-modern touch to comment on the plight of the aborigines in Australia and New Zealand without being explicit and political.
If Slow West made a crucial mistake, it was in choosing the least interesting character to be the protagonist. The oneiric quality of his journey was intriguing, but inconsistent. The narrator claims that he is changed by the way that Jay sees the world, but they never seemed to even like each other. Jay is actively challenging and antagonistic to his gunslinger for hire. Also please do not hurt me, but the gunslinger was not that great at his job. As a comedy, it is brilliant. In a drama, it is baffling. So if we should not be following KSM or Fassbender whose hotness cannot be dimmed by a bandana, who? Rose!
Slow West shows us Jay’s vision of her, but MacLean does not rigorously restrict the story to what Jay or the narrator sees. It is a sloppy element of the narrative to make a character tell a story that he did not experience, and it could have easily been fixed by eliminating the narration, but MacLean leans on that tedious tool to tell instead of show the story that he intended to tell, not the story that he told. MacLean often digresses with perspective and flashbacks in one particularly engrossing story told around a fire, but does it advance the overall story? Not really. It is a bit of whimsy.
Slow West is a story about stupid men who think that they have it more together than they do, and a young woman who grows up quickly after getting unwanted attention that leads to her and her father going in voluntary exile to a strange and distant land to escape the tyranny of class, gender, race and religion. She has an internal law and homeland that she carves out of the wildness, but is under no illusion that it makes her immune to the outside world. I did not recognize her, but Caren Pistorius played the lead kick ass chick who should have been the protagonist in Mortal Engines. Someone give her a lead role and let’s see if she still has the juice. Once is a fluke, but two times could mean something. It does not hurt that Rory McCann, best known as Game of Thrones’ The Hound, plays her pious father so she gets the association of grown Arya vibes.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Slow West is exactly what its title promises. It is more atmosphere and image than substance, and even with an eighty-four minute run time, it is not worth the trouble. To quote the great Samuel L. Jackson, “Yeah they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in hell.”