I've seen this three times now, and every time I watch it, I like it better.  With every viewing, I peel back another layer here and there, figure out a little more about the characters and the story.  There things in it I still don't get.  There are things I feel like I instinctively understand, but can't put into words.  In fact, I've started thinking of Slow West as the movie equivalent of Ernest Hemingway's "iceberg theory" of writing.  The deceptively simple storyline is the bit of iceberg you see above the water, but the more you study it, the more you realize how much there is underneath the obvious.

A Scottish teen named Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is on a quest to find and rescue his One True Love, a girl named Rose (Caren Pistorius) who recently fled Scotland with her father (Rory McCann).  Along the way, Jay gets "rescued" by a bounty hunter named Silas (Michael Fassbender), who demands Jay give him one hundred dollars in return for Silas escorting him safely to wherever it is he's going.  Since Silas goes around calmly shooting people, Jay decides to agree.  Although the audience soon learns that Silas intends to use Jay to collect a reward on Rose and her father, Jay remains blissfully unaware of this for most of the movie.


During his journey, Jay encounter a series of unusual people.  Black musicians who converse with Jay in French.  Silent natives slowly abandoning their burned village.  A German anthropologist who is studying the end of the Native American way of life.  Desperate immigrants.


And also other bounty hunters, one dressed as a minister and the other wearing a gigantic fur coat and leading a ragtag gang.  The latter is aptly named Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), and he plays an increasingly important role as the story progresses.


Side note:  I love that there are several instances here of the sound of words giving them more meaning.  Payne's name sounds like "pain."  If you say the title out loud, sounds like "slowest."  The film has a slow, leisurely pace, and Jay is also not the fastest brain in the west.  So many layers!


Anyway, Payne is also seeking to collect the reward on Rose and her father.  This makes Payne the primary antagonist for the story, though he's not any more of a Bad Guy than Silas, and in some ways, he's a better one at first.  Payne and his gang follow Silas and Jay for a while, and when Payne eventually invites himself over to their camp to share cigars and absinthe (to emphasize the movie's surreality?), things get really interesting.  We learn that he and Silas know each other, and know each other well.  Silas is angry and surly, and very mistrustful.  Payne is overly friendly, sniffing around for clues in a way that tells us he knows Jay is going to lead him straight to Rose and that reward.


We never learn what exactly went wrong between Silas and Payne previously -- Silas later says that he had joined Payne's gang when he was about Jay's age, and that when he left, he was lucky to do so with his life.  That's all.


We get a some tight close-ups of Silas during this scene, and he looks alternately angry, wary, worried, pained, and even a little bit wistful.  When Payne arrives, he interrupts Silas giving Jay his very first shave and a large dose of advice about how life works, a sort of father-and-son moment, and I feel like this points to Silas and Payne once having had a similar relationship.  Only something very bad happened that turned Silas against Payne, but not Payne against Silas.  Payne really, really wants Silas to come back to him and his gang, but Silas insists he's nothing like Payne and won't be persuaded.


It's Payne's presence that moves Silas to finally tell Jay that Rose and her father have prices on their heads.  From then on, it's just a question of who will find Rose first.

The film moves at a deceptively languid pace, seeming to drift from one experience to the next, but inexorably pulled toward a brutal climax.


The first time I watched this, I assumed that Jay was the protagonist.  The story begins with a voice-over explaining who Jay is, why he is here, and whom he seeks.  We spend a whole seven minutes with Jay before Silas ever arrives.  It's Jay who's on the journey to rescue Rose, after all.  His quest to help the girl he loves is what drives the story.  Or so I thought.


But the more I pondered the story, the more I realized that no, Jay is not the protagonist.  Silas is.


Silas has a beautiful character arc, going from a jaded and closed-off loner to a father figure for Jay, to a man willing to die to save strangers, to a man willing to live a life of responsibility.  All conveyed with a minimum of words, as he is one of the most laconic gents to grace the screen since Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.


We all know Hamlette has a deep and abiding fondness for laconic gents.  This movie is a pretty major reason why I've become a Michael Fassbender fan.  In fact, so far, Silas is my favorite Fassbender role -- yes, even over his turn as Mr. Rochester!


(If you're worried about SPOILERS about the ending, you should probably QUIT READING right here.  Or skip to the last paragraph if you're wondering about content.)


Jay, on the other hand, has no character arc.  He starts out sweet and naive and loyal, and he ends that way too.  He fulfills his purpose of protecting Rose and providing a new life for her, but he doesn't get to enjoy the fruits of his labors.  Silas does.  Silas, by growing out of selfishness into selflessness becomes the man who can provide for and take care of Rose.  Rose never loved Jay, she told him so straight out, and they had no future together.  They were too different, one a pragmatic survivor and the other a dreamy wanderer.  Silas is also a pragmatic survivor, and although he and Rose don't share many meaningful scenes, the film makes it clear they are suited to each other.  Jay doesn't get a happy ending, but Silas and Rose -- and the audience -- do.  Silas ends the film by saying, "There is more to life than survival.  Jay Cavendish taught me that.  I owe him my life."  Not his physical existence, but the life he's now living.  He's no longer alone, no longer steeped in violence.

I don't know why I didn't figure this out from the get-go, as it's Silas who narrates the story.  His first words are, "I was drifting west when I picked up his trail."  He was drifting west.  He picked up the trail.  He's the subject here, the protagonist.  The journey is really Silas's.  Jay is the means to an end, just not the end Silas originally intended.


Slow West was filmed in New Zealand, but is supposed to be set in Colorado Territory.  If you've spent a lot of time watching Middle Earth movies, the topography will probably look distinctively NOT of the American West, but if you're willing to suspend a bit of that disbelief, it works.


It's beautiful, but it's not Colorado.


Sure makes me want to visit New Zealand, though!


Much of the movie is laden with hidden meanings, mysterious and sometimes down-right strange.  It has a distinctively mythological flavor to it, Jay an otherworldly creature who draws odd happenings and people to himself.  He has prescient dreams.  Silas himself refers to Jay's survival as a miracle.  Like The Lone Ranger (2013), this movie acknowledges that we have mythologized the Old West, and it seeks to accentuate that legend-making by not remaining strictly realistic.


When we first meet Jay, he is lying on his back in the dark, pretending to shoot at the stars.  He spends the rest of the story doing the same -- pursuing an impossible dream like Don Quixote, setting off to rescue a damsel who is only in distress because of him, and leading more trouble her way without realizing it.  Silas calls him "a jackrabbit in a den of wolves."


Interestingly, we first see Jay lying on his back with his hands clasped over his chest, almost like a dead body ready for burial.  Nice bit of foreshadowing, one among many.  My other favorite is this:


Yeah, I suppose it's not all that subtle, the whole idea of a man killed by the tree he was trying to chop down being like Jay who's going to be killed by the quest he's on.  First time you watch it, though, you don't know for sure that's going to happen, and that makes it much more subtle.

Anyway, then there's Rose.


In flashbacks, we see her playing an odd, morbid game with Jay where he has to choose a way to die, and then she pretends to kill him that way.  Shot by an arrow, shot with a gun, silly but dark kid stuff, and also foreshadowing the fact that she's going to be the cause of his death.  Jay asks her if she loves him, and she says she only loves him like a brother, even though he's rich and important and she most definitely is not.


In the present, Rose lives in a nice little house with her father, where she's learning to make butter (sort of), getting interested in a sweet Native American named Kotori (Kalani Queypo), and spending a lot of time worrying that people will figure out who they are.


She might struggle with making butter, but she knows how to handle a rifle, and as soon as we meet her in her new home, I want desperately for her to survive.  For a character with only a few scenes, she makes an indelible impression.


I keep thinking I'm about done with this post, and then I think of one more thing I have to say.  Okay, last thing I'm going to discuss, honest!

Silas and Jay are always shown travelling from right to left.  I'm assuming this is partly to show that they are travelling west, since we tend to look at maps with west to the left and east to the right.


However, as this excellent video points out, "in western culture, left to right indicates the progression of time," so movie makers have coded their films to use that, and we're used to movement from left to right in movies being used to "indicate time, progress, and normality," while movement from right to left "indicates moving back in time, abnormality, and regression."  This would seem to point toward Silas returning to a previous state over the course of the film, going from the hardened, bitter, remorseless killer back to his earlier self, who was stable and helpful.


It could also be emphasizing that both Silas and Jay are abnormal, which I've discussed earlier -- Silas is a killer and a bounty hunter, a man who preys on Jay, abandons orphans, and plans to benefit from the misery of others the way we assume he has done before.  Jay is otherworldly and naive to the point of childishness, which is also not normal.  With a film as nuanced and layered as this, I have to assume the filmmakers were deliberately using directionality to influence our feelings toward these characters.


Is this movie family friendly?  Nope.  Lots of spattery violence.  Also some bad language, a bit of mild innuendo (Silas concludes that Jay has not yet "bedded" Rose), and some non-sexual nudity (a dead man's naked rear).  Not a film for kids or the squeamish!

(This is my contribution to the Power-Mad Blogathon -- go here for the official page listing all the posts!  From here on out, spoilage abounds.)

This may be a strange way to begin a blog post that's part of a blogothon celebrating Tyrone Power's 100th birthday.  But for the first fifteen minutes or so of this movie, I thought Power was horribly miscast.  He was in his forties, with a touch of grey in his hair and a lack of bounce to his step.  Jake Barnes should be in his late twenties, a survivor of the recent Great War, a still-robust young man who thinks nothing of hiking for miles and miles through the mountains to find the ultimate fishing spot.  You see, I'd reread the book prior to watching this movie version so I could compare the two (my review of the book is here), and try as I might, I could not envision Power in the role as I read.
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(Spoiler warning -- I do discuss some plot details here, but I do NOT give away the ending.)

Although released in 1944, To Have and Have Not is set in 1940, shortly after France fell to the Nazis. It takes place on Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean.  Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) owns a fishing boat, and some Free French patriots want to rent his boat to smuggle a freedom fighter onto the island.  At first, Harry says no -- he's an American and wants to stay neutral because he needs the local Vichy-controlled government's permission to do business.

But then, the Gestapo haul Harry and newcomer "Slim" (Lauren Bacall) in for questioning, which makes Harry mad, so he decides to do the people-smuggling job after all.  He says he's doing it for the money, but he clearly has anti-German (or just anti-bully) sentiments.  Plus, he wants to use part of the money to get Slim a plane ticket home.

But by now, Slim is obviously in love with Harry, and she decides to stay in Martinique to be near him.  She gets a job singing in the cafe where Harry lives, thanks to the cafe's piano player, Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael).  As Harry gets more and more embroiled in the resistance movement, so does she, and so does Harry's "rummy" friend, Eddie (Walter Brennan).

Walter Brennan needs a nap.  And a hug.

The film bears precious little resemblance to Ernest Hemingway's novel by the same name, other than that they both have a central character named Harry Morgan who owns a fishing boat.  But I'm okay with that, because you can imagine this is a prequel to the book if you want.  Or just consider them as two separate entities, which is what I do.

I kind of feel like, after the success of Casablanca in 1942, the studio wanted another anti-Nazi movie about a reluctant hero and an unlikely romance for Humphrey Bogart to star in, and this is what they came up with.  Like Rick Blaine, Bogie's character in Casablanca, Harry Morgan pretends to be selfish and materialistic, only interested in making money, not in doing what's right or what's patriotic.  But while Rick had people pretty convinced he would stick his neck out for nobody, everyone knows Harry is a softie who "carries" drunk Eddie on his ship so Eddie will have some sort of job, who buys plane tickets for stray girls to go home, who will probably be willing to rent his boat to desperate resistance fighters.  Accordingly, while I like Rick Blaine okay, I absolutely love Harry Morgan.

Just threw in this lovely shot of Bacall because she's so spunky here

This is Lauren Bacall's first film, though she'd done some acting on stage in New York.  Just in case you didn't know this already, this film was where she and Bogart met and fell in love.  The chemistry between the two of them is legendary, the stuff dreams actually are made of.  Watching them here, you can almost feel the attraction pulling them together.  I've never seen Bogie look and behave sexier than he does here -- his weather-beaten face takes on a roguish charm, his eyes glow with hope and wonder and desire.

Puppy eyes

Part of why I love this movie is the great use it makes of its supporting cast.  Hoagy Carmichael's Cricket is sympathetic and friendly, but with an air of reserve that makes me want to sit down beside him and ask him for his life's story.  Walter Brennan's Eddie is sweet, pathetic, and seemingly harmless, but he's got more gumption than he lets on.  Then there's Marcel Dalio's Frenchy, who owns the hotel/bar where much of the film is set, and who gets Harry involved with the freedom fighters.  He's nervous and sad-eyed and earnest, but also very good at persuading people to help him while looking harmless and helpless.  All three characters could have been caricatures or just warm-blooded scenery, but instead are vital, fully-realized, and intriguing.

Hoagy Carmichael, Lauren Bacall, and loads of extras

I first saw this when I was in high school, so probably about 15 years ago.  I recall also watching it in college, once with my dear friend ED, and once with my then-boyfriend, now-husband Cowboy.  And I know I watched it when we lived in WI.  So this was my fifth viewing, and the first in at least 5 years.  Each time I see it, I find new layers, new nuances I'd never noticed or considered before.  For example, when I first watched it in high school, I didn't pick up on most of the innuendo in the scenes between Bogart and Bacall.  It wasn't until this viewing that I noticed the similarities between Harry and Casablanca's Rick.  I could go on, but this review is long enough as it is.




Because this is my first entry into the Period Drama Challenge, I will take a moment to remark on the costumes and general period-ness of this film.  Because it's both set and filmed in the 1940s, I kind of assume the costumes are pretty accurate for the era.  I absolutely love Bacall's checkered suit.

Bogie and Bacall

She pulls off the slinky, midriff-baring dress for her debut as a lounge singer too, though I don't like it quite as well.

Rrrrrrrrow

But my favorite of her costumes is her striped bathrobe, simple and homey, looking kind of worn and well-traveled, like it's something that reminds her of the home she ran away from, ugly but beloved.

Sizzzzzzzzzzle

Bogart spends most of the movie in some variation of the same outfit, a white button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled deliciously to the elbow, a black kerchief rolled and tied around his neck, a jaunty captain's hat, and either denim-looking pants with enormous back pockets or else off-white trousers.

Aboard his boat

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work he goes

I don't know much about Martinique during WWII, so I don't know how historically accurate this movie is, but of course, the Vichy government and the Free French were definitely real. 

I absolutely recommend this film!  It does contain a lot of cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, and some violence, though it's mostly implied violence, not at all gory or bloody.  And there's a lot of flirty, innuendo-laden dialog, which progresses to a bit of kissing, nothing more.  Oh, no bad language either!  It probably moves too slowly for a lot of younger viewers, but otherwise is pretty appropriate for all audiences.

I've been a fan of Ernest Hemingway's writing for a decade now -- I actually first decided to read something by him because I went through a phase where I loved the movie City of Angels (1998).  Nicolas Cage's character recommends Hemingway to Meg Ryan's character because of how well he writes about food, and leaves A Moveable Feast on her nightstand.  The library didn't have that book, but they had The Sun Also Rises, and I picked that one because of the quote from Ecclesiastes at the beginning.  Ecclesiastes just happens to be one of my favorite books of the Bible, you see.  Anyway, I liked Hemingway's economical writing, and over the years, I've read all his short stories and several of his other novels.  But I'd never read For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is my brother's favorite Hemingway book (mine so far is A Moveable Feast).  So I decided it was high time to read it.

So I read it.  But I didn't like it much.  (Sorry, Johnnycake!)  In fact, I'd have to say it is my second-least-favorite Hemingway work.  (My least favorite is the unfinished Garden of Eden.)

It was just so bleak!  Unmitigatedly bleak.  There's an old joke I read in a Reader's Digest years ago about how different famous authors would answer the question of "Why did the chicken cross the road?"  I don't remember any of them anymore except the one for Hemingway, which was:  "To die.  In the rain.  Alone."  And I always kind of laughed about that, because for me, most of Hemingway isn't all that depressing.  Sure, a lot of his stories end sadly, in a sort of inevitable way, but none of the other things I've read by him have pounded Sadness!  Despair!  Pointless Death!  into the ground like this does.

If you have no idea what it's about, here's a quick recap:  An American volunteer named Robert Jordan, a volunteer in the Spanish republican army during the Spanish Civil War, gets sent to join this guerrilla band and blow up a bridge with their help.  He falls in love with a young girl named Maria, who was orphaned and raped by the opposing forces earlier in the war.  All the characters spend the whole time talking about how doomed the mission is and how they're all going to die.  And then most of them do die.  And not in a glorious, cathartic, serves-some-greater-purpose way like all the characters in Hamlet dying at the end.  Just in a bleak, pointless, inevitable-yet-preventable way.

Obviously, the point is that war is pointless and bleak and horrid.  I get that.  I just don't like the book.  Like I said the other day, I have to want to be friends with at least one character in a book (or movie, or TV show) to like it, and I didn't really want to be friends with anyone in this book.  I liked Pilar okay, the other female character, but not that much either.  So I spend the last half of the book thinking, "Oh, man, will this ever end?  I'm so tired of reading this!"  Because it was Hemingway, I did at least enjoy the writing, but not enough to make me like the book.