Salvation, The

Synopsis: In early 1870s America, a peaceful Danish immigrant settler Jon (Mads Mikkelsen), kills his family's murderer in the hamlet of Black Creek, which in turn unleashes the fury of Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the murdered man’s ruthless brother and town stand-over merchant  The cowardly townspeople betray Jon into the hands of their tormentor. You know the rest.

There’s nothing really new in this Western from one-time Dogme card-carrier Kristian Levring. Content-wise it’s the familiar scenario of a good-hearted David figure in battle with an evil Goliath.  Mads Mikkelsen is the honest small farmer who has just welcomed his loving wife and child to his home in the New World after a separation of seven years. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the psychotic oil company henchman who with the usual platoon of leering thugs (all of whom will, of course, be dead by the film's end) has made his gun the law and turned decent God-fearin’ folk into sniveling cowards. 

Whilst thematically Clint Eastwood's outings in the revenge Western such as The Outlaw Josey Wales are evident precursors stylistically the film owes much to the classical Western architecture of John Ford and Sergio Leone: the widescreen cinematography of barren lands, the framing of narrative events with proscenium like doorways, the inexorable pacing and low rumblings of dust-parched, whiskey-soaked voices, and so on. Levring  is hardly the first to go down this road  - the Western is, after-all, one of the most hard-coded of all film genres, constantly revisiting and reassembling its archetypes. Sometimes this results in a flimsy pastiche such as Lawrence Kasdan’s 1994 Wyatt Earp, sometimes it works as in James Mangold's vigorous 2007 remake of 3:10 To Yuma.

What Danish director Levring and his co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen,  the latter best known for his efforts for Susanne Bier’s intense contemporary character studies In A Better World and Brothers, bring to the table with their ambitious film is a trenchantly dour Nordic interpretation of the ways of the West. Only Eastwood’s appropriately titled Unforgiven has come this close to conjoining base violence and bitter suffering with righteous justice (one alsomight mention Richard Wilson's unjustly overlooked Invitation To A Gunfighter, 1964).  One can well question if Levring’s film’s title is meant ironically.  “Retribution” would seem to be a more fitting moniker.

This decidedly Northern European perspective is sustained by a brilliant Danish creative team. The  film was shot in South Africa with Jens Schlosser’s evocative cinematography cleverly keyed in post-production to create a classic Western look. Jorgen Munk’s production design creates a stylized near-theatrical setting for events in the town itself that perfectly suits the kind of elemental conflict unfolding, and proceedings are quietly counterpointed by Kasper Winding’s restrained guitar and string score with its distant echoes of Ennio Morricone. Perhaps there are a little too many shots of spur-jangling boots shot at ground level but that is a very minor and forgiveably hard-to-resist over-indulgence.

In the lead, Mads Mikkelsen is, as ever, compelling with his graven good looks, his eyes dead to everything but revenge, his skin as weather-beaten as saddle leather. The screenplay cleverly makes Jon and his brother, played by Mikael Persbrandt, a couple of veterans of the 1864 Second Schleswig War between Denmark and The German Confederation, so we know why these immigrant farmers know how to handle themselves so well against Wild West low-lives. Opposite him Jeffrey Dean Morgan makes for a charmingly violent hired gun corrupted by the power he wields over his cowering victims.  And in a nice touch (well “nice” in the spirit of the film) as the only female of note in the story, Eva Green is no eye-candy but plays a scarred mute and has to act solely with her facial expressions. It's a small role but a telling one.  Rounding out the interesting casting choices, Jonathan Pryce also makes a impressive appearance as the town’s mayor and undertaker.

For all its generic elements, much like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, The Salvation draws its bead on the rise of American,  or perhaps simply and literally-put, Western capitalism. In this respect it is a brutal film  - not so much in the physical violence depicted, although there is enough of that - as in its Calvinistic view of mankind as a race given to Godlessness and deserving of retribution (the film’s ending teeters on the brink of complete purgation, and some may wish that it had gone further than it does).

There are only a couple of elements that some may take issue with. One is that when Jon's brother escapes from jail it is morning but the following scene cuts to night. Where has he been in the intervening time? one wonders. More noticeably, from about the mid-point a lot of charred buildings hitherto unseen appear as if a considerable portion of the action had been excised,

Still, impressively aware of its lineage, accomplished in execution and with a bracingly non-Hollywood sensibility, The Salvation is a marvellous film that every Western buff should take into contention.  

 

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