A strangely thin vision of the West

Joe on Slow West

There’s a spare, fable-like quality to Slow West that I found initially impressive.  We meet Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smitt-McPhee), an earnest wide-eyed teenager, alone somewhere in the middle of the vast north American continent and heading west in pursuit of the girl he loves. 

The dangers of this environment are starkly illustrated when Jay runs into a group of renegade soldiers on a brutal hunt for Native Americans. The boy is rescued by a taciturn, cigar-chewing outlaw, Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender). And you know that these two, the moonstruck innocent and the cynical gunslinger, are destined to complete a journey together – a journey with a moral dimension, no doubt.

The acting is great, the photography’s beautiful, the pace nicely controlled, and for a while I bought the dreamlike oddity of the journey. I enjoyed the three Congolese buskers, singing of love by the side of the path, though their laidback performance is incongruous in this savage place where no one is safe and white men shoot Indians for sport, and though their portentous significance is rather too obviously signposted by Jay’s observation that ‘love, like death, is universal’.

In its own way, the general goods store seemed equally unlikely, plonked somewhere on the road, apparently unconnected to any kind of human settlement. The fact that the place is shot up by desperate travellers within minutes of our first encountering it seemed rather too convenient in dramatic terms. But the wonder, I couldn’t help thinking, was that it hadn’t happened years before.

After a while it was this lack of context that began to bother me. Early on we see Jay finding his way with a compass. He’s going west – what other guide would he need? Everyone else is going west as well, including an outlaw gang, of which Silas was once a member, and a lone bounty-hunter armed with a hi-tech rifle and a clerical collar – except, of course, the ones who are going east. At one point Jay and Silas briefly debate the possibility of shaking off the gang by going north instead. But west it has to be because that’s where the girl is. And so somehow it’s not surprising that when they come across a corn field with a farmhouse in the middle Jay is in no doubt that it’s where the girl lives, and he’s right – not surprising in terms of the film’s internal logic, but bafflingly random in terms of American geography.

Perhaps this is meant to suggest the fabulous nature of Jay’s quest – the quiet simplicity of the farmhouse has already been weirdly anticipated in a dream he has on the road. Perhaps it’s meant to be funny. If so, the joke fatally weakened my sense of engagement. It was around this time that it occurred to me that the West evoked in this film is not unlike Ambridge – a long thin Ambridge running across a continent, where there’s a farm and a shop and a vicar making house-calls and everyone knows everyone else, and family values finally assert themselves, though only after some bouts of very un-Ambridge-like carnage. 

Jenny's heckle

Oh Joe, Joe. You are so kind and so moderate. You recognize that directors and producers mostly don’t set out to make bad films and that they are doing their best. You liked this film. I found it unbearable.

The great Philip French, wonderful film critic now retired, more wonderful even than the also wonderful late Roger Ebert, did have one weakness in his writing career. He could not disguise his boyish love for action films, including Westerns. Even when he recommended them, I passed up on the opportunity to see what it was that he liked so much, though usually I was docile in following his lead and rarely disagreed with his majestic judgements. This time, lured by the plaudits of the (95% male) critics, I decided to swallow my scepticism.

The movie is faithful to the Western genre. The actors don’t need to bother much with learning lines because there are so few to learn. The hero communicates in grunts, in looks - or through silence. He likes his horse more than he likes people. In the Wild West world, people actually cannot speak in multi-clause sentences. All disputes, even when trivial, are resolved by shooting. This is because the genre depends on the characters having a very poor grasp of influencing skills. It’s either give in or fight to the death – literally. The idea of maybe – umm - negotiating and discussing, occurs to no one. Women do not feature in Westerns except as steamy temptresses or as coinage for possession: in this film, literally as bounty.

Slow West has a peculiar plot. A teenager in 19^th c Scotland is so fixed on a naïve first love that somehow he can get himself to America to follow her. Then, he is miraculously able to track down this love. Why would an obscure incident in Scotland attract bounty hunters many thousands of miles away? None of this is ever explained. Yes, as Joe says, it’s just like Ambridge: a vicar, a shop, a farm, families and some implausible dramas. I noticed that, even in this primitive and violent society, young women were apparently able to buy eyeliner and mascara. Perhaps there was more in that village store than seemed to be suggested by the production designer.

You should go to see this film if you like horses, guns, close-ups of guns, random meaningless violence, Coen Brothers films (see above), attempts at black humour that are not funny, New Zealand, Michael Fassbender. If none of these interests you then don’t bother.