by Robert Bouffard, Editor
Viggo Mortensen might be best known for playing Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, but he has a long history of showing that there’s more to him as an artist than being a rugged ranger from Númenórean heritage. On top of his former penchant for showing up as a supporting player in notable films (Carlito’s Way, Witness, Crimson Tide), Mortensen has made a name for himself post-Rings as a somewhat unconventional leading man, starring in the likes of multiple David Cronenberg projects (including an Oscar-nominated performance in Eastern Promises), The Road, Thirteen Lives, A Dangerous Method, Captain Fantastic, and Green Book, being nominated for Oscars for the latter two. In 2020, then, Mortensen leveraged his reputation to make his directorial debut, Falling, a touching portrait for a man living with his aging and ailing father. Mortensen showed real directorial prowess in that film, and now uses his experience to make The Dead Don’t Hurt, a sort of anti-Western which subverts the typical tropes of the genre.
Not only did Mortensen direct The Dead Don’t Hurt, he wrote, costars, produced, and composed the score for it, as he did with Falling. The rare quinfecta in itself is a notable achievement. This isn’t some homemade, no-budget movie made on a small scale — it has bonafide Hollywood stars, including the likes of Vicky Krieps, Danny Huston, and Garret Dillahunt. So for Mortensen to at least competently do all of those jobs at once is worthy of note.
But competency usually doesn’t equate to excellence’s and that’s the case in The Dead Don’t Hurt. It’s clear Mortensen’s heart is in the right place, but there is largely too much going on in the movie as a whole for it to be cohesive; it’s too ambitious for its own good. Mortensen’s Holger is a Dutch immigrant in the 1860s American West, who meets a French-Canadian woman, Vivienne (Krieps), and they move to a small Nevada homestead. But duty and honor call Holger off to fight in the American Civil War, despite being of an age well past that of a typical soldier. Holger’s departure leaves Vivienne alone in Nevada after upending her life to be with him.
Again, the heart is in the right place here. It’s conceived as a feminist story about the brashness of men, but it’s really ultimately ill-conceived and misguided. Essentially, a man saves a woman from an abusive husband (muddled messaging at best), they move to the middle of nowhere and he leaves for war, since that’s what men do (better, more direct messaging), then she cries about it, is assaulted, and needs the man to go get revenge for her (quite rough messaging there!). I know the heart is in the right place, but the execution isn’t quite there.
The movie wants to thrive in the little, quite moments, and for the most part it does. Krieps has shown she has some incredible skill in the likes of Phantom Thread and even the ever-Shyamalan-y Old, and she is excellent when the focus is on her. It’s just that the focus is so often not solely on her, and that’s where the movie misses its conviction, as it leans into some classic Western tropes, like that of an outlaw villain needing to be stopped by the quiet hero.
In isolation, some of these tropey moments work (there’s a showdown at the end that’s as tense as some of Krieps’ scenes are moving), but taken within the whole of the movie, I’m left feeling confused and unfocused. Though it is a credit to Mortensen’s direction that the movie makes any sense at all, as it cuts between time periods, locations, and characters. While some of those scenes have a pace that doesn’t match the tone, the string score with a classical Western bend does some heavy lifting to bring in emotion.
So while The Dead Don’t Hurt is probably a step down from Mortensen’s initial directorial effort, it still demonstrates enough to show he has a filmmaking prowess that’s worth paying attention to.
Rating: It Was Just Okay
The Dead Don’t Hurt is currently playing in theaters
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