Every once in a while, we find ourselves wanting to watch a traditional western movie. You know . . . good guys and bad guys, a woman in distress, corrupt officials, someone wronged and seeking revenge, horseback chases, sweeping landscapes. If we can’t have Clint Eastwood, then Viggo Mortensen is an excellent substitute. He wrote, directed, and scored The Dead Don’t Hurt. And he’s got the looks of the classic good guy.
The story unfolds nonlinearly, but figure that it mostly takes place in the 1860s. Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen) is a Danish immigrant who meets Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), a French Canadian flower seller, in San Francisco. She rejects a wealthy suitor and heads off to Nebraska with him. He has a primitive cabin there, which she begins to make into a home, planting a garden and flowers. He’s initially also the sheriff of the small town nearby run by a corrupt mayor (Danny Huston) and two real bad guys, rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt) and his despicable son Weston (Solly McLeod).
Just when Holger and Vivienne are falling in love, he decides to join the Union Army and head off to fight in the Civil War, leaving her alone in the cabin. To make ends meet, she takes a job in a saloon where she attracts the unwanted attention of Weston.
It is Vivienne’s character that makes this western quite different from others we’ve seen. She is an independent, strong-willed woman who would be right at home in one of today’s #Me Too demonstrations. Unlike so many women in western films, even when in distress, she stands up for herself. We get a sense of where her courage and hope come from in flashbacks from her childhood.
Soft-spoken with eyes that are keenly observant of what is happening around her, Vicky Krieps turns Vivienne into a role model for her times: self-confident, versatile, and resilient. The next time we are in the mood for a traditional western, we hope we can find another one where a woman can hold her own in a male-dominated culture.