Well-received but largely overlooked, this chamber Western apparently started & stopped writer/director John Maclean’s promising career track. (No credits in the last eight years, not an atypical real-world fallout after splashy success at Sundance.) Neatly melding the sort of modest ornery Westerns Budd Boetticher & Randolph Scott were making in the ‘50s with the nihilistic Neo-Noir present-day ‘Westerns’ popping up in the ‘80s (and at a trim 83"), Maclean heads West in 1870's America as Kodi Smit-McPhee’s romantic young naïf pursues Rose, the girl of his dreams who left Scotland before him. Joined none too soon by Michael Fassbender’s ‘protector’ at a particularly threatening moment as the film begins, he’s unaware the girl he loves (along with her father) has a $2000 reward on her head for murder or that Fassbender is actually a bounty hunter using him to guide him toward her. Picaresque and picturesque, the film plays out as a series of lethal adventures, deliberately paced & low-key, yet leaving more dead bodies in its wake than the last act of HAMLET. Mostly very accomplished, it could have filled in more of the girl’s backstory (she comes off as heartless), and Maclean no master of subjective POV, but fitted out with a fine sense of grandeur & absurdity that never feels condescending. A common problem on those ‘80s noirs.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Never noticed it before, but here Mr. Fassbender is something of a ringer for the young Charlton Heston, if a far more fluid actor. The face, form, even more the back of the neck.
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