Film Friday: Michael Fassbender, Kodi Smit-McPhee head west in ‘Slow West’

While the big-budget Western is long gone, the genre is thriving among indie filmmakers. Slow West, the directorial debut of John Maclean, is one of the stronger Westerns in recent years, even if it was actually shot in New Zealand with no American actors in major roles.

The film stars Kodi Smit-McPhee, the X-Men’s new Nightcrawler, as a young Scottish high born named Jay Cavendish. Back home, he fell in love with Rose (Caren Pistorius), who has run off to the American west. He hopes to find her and manages to get well past the Mississippi River all by himself.

But Maclean, who also wrote the script, does not begin the film here. Instead, we find Jay already in America and short scenes introduce us to his goal in mere seconds. As the credits roll, Jay finds himself suddenly at gunpoint before the roguish bounty hunter Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) saves him. Jay agrees to pay Silas to help him reach Rose and her father, but he doesn’t know that Silas has an ulterior motive for helping him.

For the majority of the film, it does feel a bit like True Grit, which also featured a young idealistic child paired with a bombastic brute. But while John Wayne (and later Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers version) plays a more rambunctious character, Michael Fassbender is much more restrained. Fassbender, who was also a producer on this, fully understands Silas as a bounty hunter who still has a little heart in him. The standoffish personality he displays is more like a facade to show Jay that he’s serious, but you never really feel like Silas is really going to turn on Jay.

Aside from Fassbender, Maclean really lucked out in getting Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn to play Payne, a gang leader that Silas was originally affiliated with. Mendelsohn doesn’t get a lot of screentime, but he chews the scenery whenever he’s on screen. You get the feeling that he would have made a great villain in Old Hollywood Westerns.

In addition, Maclean and cinematographer Robbie Ryan show the full beauty of New Zealand, which proves to be the perfect stand-in for the American Northwest. The visuals make the slow journey that much more easier to enjoy.

Slow West is a tragedy, like most great stories of the West. It takes just 80 minutes for Maclean to tell his story, but the pacing is still slow and deliberate. We learn about Jay’s background when Silas figures it out. That makes perfect sense of course, since Silas is the narrator.

There’s challenging questions put before the viewer - like how far you should go for someone you love, even if you’re unsure they love you back - but Maclean wisely keeps it simple with plenty of surprises. No punches are pulled, which is just the way the West should be presented.

Slow West is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Instant Video.

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