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The American Orson Welles was a towering figure in 20th century film-making. He would commonly write, produce, direct and star in his own movies. After his ground-breaking (and brilliant) first film, “Citizen Kane” (1941) he was blacklisted for a time by Hollywood and ended up making sherry commercials and doing voice-overs. He also loved bull-fighting and spent much time in Ronda where he befriended top torero of the time, Antonio Ordoñez. Welles’ ashes are scattered at the Ordoñez estate just outside the City of the Tajo.
Is Danish actor Viggo Mortensen the new Welles? The newly released “The Dead Don’t Hurt”, a Western, was written by Mortensen, who produced and directed the film and starred in it. He also composed the music.
How did he do? The Culture Vulture has just seen the film, a fortnight after its release in Spain. Here’s his review.
"The Dead Don't Hurt"
Preamble
Once a month the local cinema, MulticinesRonda, shows a film in versión original, usually English, with Spanish subtitles. Organised by the admirable Delphine Du Boys, a French-born resident of Ronda, the initiative is well-supported by English-speaking residents in the area, as well as a significant number of Spanish locals, keen to improve their English.
“The Dead Don't Hurt” is a 2023 Western film written, directed and produced by Viggo Mortensen, and starring Mortensen, and Vicky Krieps, a Luxembourgish-German actress, whose breakout role was alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread” (2017).
Mortensen also composed the score to the film.
“The Dead Don't Hurt” premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
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Synopsis
"The Dead Don't Hurt" - Spanish title "Hasta el fin del mundo" - is a story of star-crossed lovers on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s. French-Canadian Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) is a fiercely independent woman who falls in love with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen) in San Francisco.
She agrees to travel with him to his home near the quiet town of Elk Flats, Nevada, where they start a life together. The outbreak of the American Civil War separates them when Olsen makes a fateful decision to go and fight for the Union.
This leaves Vivienne to fend for herself in a place controlled by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his unscrupulous business partner, powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt). Alfred's violent, wayward son Weston (Solly McLeod) aggressively pursues Vivienne, who is determined to resist his unwanted advances, but fails.
When Olsen returns from the war, he and Vivienne must confront and make peace with the person each has become.
Both a tragic love story and a nuanced depiction of the conflict between revenge and forgiveness, "The Dead Don't Hurt" is a portrait of a passionate woman determined to stand up for herself in an unforgiving world dominated by ruthless men.
In an interview with The Times, Krieps described working with Mortensen on the film:
“In the world of Westerns there were not many women. So that was very tough. Of all men he is very soft and open and very 'there'. But still it reminded me why I like to work with women.”
Release dates
“The Dead Don't Hurt” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023.
“The Dead Don't Hurt” was released under the title “Hasta el fin del mundo” in Spain on 10 May 2024.
“The Dead Don't Hurt” is scheduled to be released in the United States on 31 May, 2024, and in Germany in August 2024.
Critical Acclaim
The Culture Vulture loved it.
After all the mediocre Westerns I’ve had to put up with throughout my seven decades on this earth, this was a breath of fresh air.
I would put it a close second to my all-time favourite, the spaghetti Western “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Sergio Leone 1968). With a cast of famous actors, Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards and music by Ennio Morricone, it was a landmark film.
By contrast “The Dead Don't Hurt” has a cast of relative unknowns – the only ones I’d heard of were Mortensen and Krieps. Nevertheless, this was a thoughtful film, beautifully shot in Canada and Mexico.
I arrived at MulticinesRonda very tired, after several nights of broken sleep, yet the film, quite long at over 2 hours, kept me awake.
It was a veritable “tour de force”.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 83% of 30 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "A solid step forward for Viggo Mortensen as a director, The Dead Don't Hurt offers viewers a comfortably old-fashioned Western with a satisfying, character-driven story."
Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 67 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Top review on iMDB read as follows:
“Despite the fact that the plot has plenty of holes, this Western just about works. It's all about the determined ‘Vivienne’, very much a woman in a man's world of pioneering in the 1860s.
"She encounters the honest and thoughtful ‘Olsen’ and travels to his remote, and rather ramshackle, shack where they begin to make a home for themselves.
"He takes a job as the town’s sheriff and she, a little to his chagrin, starts working in the saloon.
"He is restless, though, and with the American Civil War looming large, he decides that he ought to use his Danish army training and go enlist. She's not enamoured of the idea, but off he goes and that leaves her alone and firmly in the sights of spoilt local ‘Weston’ (the rather un-menacing Solly McLeod).
"When ‘Olsen’ returns from the war quite a few years later he is presented with a few shocks!
"Subsequent events take an even more tragic turn, and now he must face his demons and settle accounts. This is a grand-looking romantic drama that takes it's time to get going and that allows Krieps to invest strongly in the maturing elements of her character.
"That he would just saunter off for years and leave her alone and unprotected does beggar belief a bit, and there's no denying that does negatively impact on the plausibility of what, rather obviously, comes next.
"Still, there is enough meat on the bones of the story, an effectively sparing amount of dialogue and a soupçon of chemistry between the two at the top of the cast that gives some indication of just how tough and lawless life was and at how difficult it was to be decent! 7/10."
Conclusion
Mortensen’s contribution as writer, producer, director, lead actor and score composer is consummate – a truly new “Orson Welles”.
I recommend the film highly.
© The Culture Vulture
Acknowledgements:
etsy
Facebook.
Fotogramas
IMDb
Paul Whitelock
Rotten Tomatoes
Wikipedia
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