Bodies pile up fast in ‘Slow West’

If you're interested in Westerns — and who of a certain age is not? — then you might want to check out "Slow West," which is playing at the Magic Lantern. Following is a transcription of the review I wrote for Spokane Public Radio:

American filmmaking was, for a time, mired in the Western myth. Great U.S. filmmakers such as John Ford and Howard Hawks made great cinema out of tales that, to be frank, were more wish-fulfillment than actual history. And television followed the trend.

.On big screens and small, most Native Americans were portrayed as savage painted killers, most cowboys handy with a rope or a gun, most towns filled with saloons and streets that served as thoroughfares for cattle drives or high-noon pistol duels. Only on occasion did real life – the day-to-day drudgery of farming on the plains, for example – interrupt the far more dramatic narrative preferred by filmmakers. And, let’s be honest, audiences.

That all began to change in the 1970s when, one, Westerns started to become more politically correct and, two, they began to wane in popularity. Today, about the only Westerns we see are deconstructionist models such as Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” or foreign perspectives such as John Maclean’s “Slow West.”

Writer-director Maclean’s film, which is playing at Spokane’s Magic Lantern Theater, is based on the feelings he developed as a child watching such films as Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” – itself a commentary on, and alternate-telling of, the classic American Western.

So it should come as no surprise that “Slow West” blends a variety of views, some familiar, some clearly foreign, into something that both pays tribute to the work of, say, Ford and Hawks, while creating something more clearly contemporary.

Maclean gives us the story of Jay Cavendish, a 16-year-old Scottish boy (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) who has come to the 1870 American West to find the girl he considers his one true love. As we gradually discover, Jay feels responsible for Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius) and her father John having to flee Scotland.

But as we know from the beginning, through a voiceover delivered by one Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), Jay is a sheep among wolves. And it is only when Selleck saves him, then offers – for a fee – to guide him, that Jay has a chance of succeeding.

Success, though, is a relative notion, as we – and Jay – discover time and again through encounters with starving immigrants, embattled Indians, duplicitous travelers, greedy bounty hunters and a landscape (New Zealand passing for Colorado) that is as vast and breathtakingly beautiful as it is harsh and unforgiving. Sometimes success means merely surviving long enough to wake up and start the struggle anew.

Such a scenario isn’t particularly original. But, then, we are talking about a genre that is overfull of familiar tropes. And, in contrast, Maclean offers the occasional sequence that feels arrestingly original, almost magically realistic – the climax, for example, which takes place in a tiny-house-nation type cottage set at the edge of an Oz-like wheat field.

And despite all the brutality, Maclean does put a heart at the center of his story. It is, we learn, only through the sort of innocence that Jay displays that life finds an inherent value – and meaning.

You just have to trudge though dozens of corpses to get there.