Michael C here reporting from an unseasonably warm Park City
John Maclean's Slow West is an ambitious western that falls short of its lofty aspirations because of its thin execution and its dud of a protagonist. The protagonist is 16-year-old Jay Cavendish played by Kodi Smit-McPhee as a naif spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with the dangers of frontier travel in 1870. The voice over from Michael Fassbender's tough guy bounty hunter opens the film with the observation that it's a miracle Cavendish made it as far he did without getting murdered. We in the audience size him up with his innocent doe eyes and his still-waiting-for-puberty physique and we quite agree. He would surely have been doomed had Fassbender's Silas not taken him under his wing as a travel companion.
More...
This all would be a fine dynamic for a film, the weathered cowboy dropping a cold dose of reality on the young fool with his romantic ideas about true love and the West. Unfortunately, Slow West tries to push the idea that Jay is some kind of pure soul with poetry in his heart who can impart a lesson to the brutes like Fassbender about aspiring to something higher. Actually I thought the kid came off like a dope.
I've already seen Slow West described by more than one person as the first western about "the friend zone", and while it is a glib line, it isn't far off. Back in Scotland, Jay was an upperclass kid longing for a country girl named Rose, despite the obvious fact that she harbors no romantic feelings. She describes her relationship with Jay as that of a little brother, a Wyoming-sized signal Jay chooses to ignore in his dogged pursuit of what he considers to be his soul mate. When his persistence leads to an altercation and an accidental death Rose and her father are forced to flee the country. This is how Fassbender's bounty hunter comes to find Jay plodding haplessly through the most dangerous parts of post-Civil War America in hopes of rescuing the girl he considers, against all evidence, to be his lady love. It's less The Searchers, and more 'The Stalkers'.
One can't fault Maclean for lack of trying. Slow West is an odd melange of tones with big ideas about living versus surviving and the destruction of beauty in a cruel world. Characters have anachronistic nostalgia for the West, talking about trips to the moon and the destruction of the natives as if they are looking back with a perspective they can't possibly have. It gives the film an interesting experimental edge, but it's all too shallow to pack much oomph. We never learn much about Fassbender's Silas, for example, save that he's cool and competent in a Fassbender-ish sort of way. We get hints of his dark past but they're lost in the haze of the film's meandering middle section. The relationship between Silas and Jay never builds much beyond their initial dynamic, so it comes out of nowhere when Silas has big change of heart over to Jay's romantic way of thinking.
Ben Mendelsohn at the premiere in his character's coat! (Photo by Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP)
Even if the film doesn't cohere as any kind of satisfying whole, there is much to occupy one's attention as it noodles around. The visuals are often striking, finding a hint of the surreal in the frontier landscape. Even if Silas is an underdeveloped character, Fassbender manages to fill in the blanks with movie star charisma as does the invaluable Ben Mendelsohn who delivers the character actor goods when he turns up decked out in a giant fur coat as one of Silas's former partners in crime. The action finale is a corker which might have had a real impact had we not surrendered any interest in these characters long before. Best of all is a strain of black humor that peeks through here and there. Slow West actually contains what might be the biggest single laugh of Sundance with an Airplane-level gag that caused an explosion of laughter at my screening at what ostensibly a very serious moment. I'll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and say it was intentional.
Grade: C+