Viggo west…
★★★★☆ OUT 7 JUNE CINEMAS
DIRECTOR Viggo Mortensen STARRING Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Solly McLeod, Garret Dillahunt, Colin Morgan SCREENPLAY Viggo Mortensen DISTRIBUTOR Signature Entertainment RUNNING TIME 129 mins
Set in 1860s Nevada, Viggo Mortensen’s sophomore feature as writer/director is a western with all the trappings you’d expect: wide-brimmed hats, swinging saloon doors, six-shooters… But it also offers a degree of sensitivity you wouldn’t so readily associate with the genre. This duality is laid bare at the start, when we witness the last gasps of Vicky Krieps’ Vivienne, who’s dreaming of a knight on horseback (a poetic touch that returns, effectively, throughout the film).
Meanwhile, a man in a long black coat shoots up a bar before fleeing. An absence of justice sees Sheriff Olsen (Mortensen) turn in his badge and leave town with his young son.
Both parts comprise an effective opener that gets you invested, before Mortensen takes a more leisurely, dual-timelined approach to lay out the lead-up to and fallout from these incidents. Most of the runtime concerns what came before, as we follow French-Canadian Vivienne from her childhood to her emigration to America. There she meets Danish immigrant Olsen in San Francisco, before they head to his spartan Nevada homestead.
Mortensen’s movie is more love story on the range than a lawman vs blackhat revenge western. Krieps
