‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ Review: Viggo Mortensen Disappears From His Own Western for a Spell, Letting Vicky Krieps Lead

Mortensen’s understated and nonlinear second feature privileges the female perspective, pushing back on the violent tropes of studio Westerns like ‘Appaloosa.’

From the second scene of Mortensen’s second feature, “The Dead Don’t Hurt” (following 2020’s excellent father-son drama “Following”), audiences know the fate of Vivienne LeCoudy (Vicky Krieps). A resilient French Canadian pioneer woman left alone for years, Vivienne dies at home in bed, a single tear making tracks on her dusty cheek. For no good reason, Mortensen opts to tell her story out of order, flashing back to Vivienne’s childhood (to show the character-defining disappearance of her fur-trapper father) and carrying on past her death to reveal whether her absentee partner (played by Mortensen) manages to avenge what happened to her.

That nonlinear narrative choice in an otherwise understated art-house Western serves to confuse more than it reveals, complicating things for the meat-and-potatoes crowd that regularly turn out for cowboy stories. Set during the Civil War but made with a mindset more in line with the #MeToo era, Mortensen’s sensitive take on a traditionally violent genre opens with Vivienne’s dying vision of a knight in shining armor coming to rescue her. That fantasy occurs twice more in the film, which stays behind with Vivienne as fellow immigrant and all-but-husband Holger Olsen (Mortensen) enlists to defend the Union.

The next time we see the knight, he lifts the visor to reveal Holger’s eyes beneath the helmet. Later, Vivienne pictures herself inside the armor, a self-reliant, modern-day Joan of Arc. In a feminist twist on the John Wayne paradigm, the movie allows Vivienne to be her own savior … sort of. But before she makes that breakthrough, Vivienne must endure all manner of indignity and disrespect from 19th-century men — and not just in her new home near Elk Flats, Nev., but also back East, where a pompous rich gentleman bores her by bragging about his wealth and accomplishments.

It is there, selling fresh-cut flowers on the street, that Vivienne spots Holger, a Danish carpenter to whom she’s instantly attracted. Mortensen plays it cool at first, his laid-back character bemusedly looking on as Vivienne tells off her suitor. Both she and Holger are immigrants, skeptical of the way native-born citizens comport themselves. (Later, in Elk Flats, she befriends a Mexican piano player whose Spanish-language “cluckety-cluck” rankles the town’s racist attitudes.) Krieps is ideal casting for this uniquely tender-strong character. Faced with the choice between a comfortable life in a golden cage and whatever Holger may have to offer, Vivienne decides to travel west with him, only to find that the home’s a dump and the town’s corrupt.

How many partners have attached themselves to someone else’s dream, then had to adapt when it proves disappointing? Films rarely frame that experience from the woman’s perspective, which makes Mortensen’s enlightened approach fairly refreshing, even if Vivienne’s independence manifests itself in a way that anyone can sense is bad news (and not just because we see a varmint shooting up the saloon and hightailing it out of town early on). Determined to earn her own money, Vivienne applies for a job in that very same saloon, where that very same varmint, Weston (“Tom Jones” star Solly McLeod), lecherously hires her on the spot.

Wearing his entitlement as menacing as his villainous black hat, Weston acts like he owns the bar — as it happens, he does — and everything in it, smashing whom and what he pleases. One night, the young pest shows up drunk at Vivienne’s cabin and forces himself on her (a development that’s predictable to us but comes as a surprise to Krieps’ otherwise intelligent character). After so many subtleties, it’s unfortunate that Mortensen relies on rape as a plot device, though Vivienne’s reaction reinforces the strength she finds in Holger’s absence: defiantly showing up at work the next day, raising the child that results from this violation.

One of the film’s best scenes — emblematic of the way the movie communicates many of its ideas without dialogue — occurs years later, when Holger accepts the boy as his own. When the characters do speak, they express themselves in a clumsy, overwrought way, as if they’ve been watching “Deadwood” and wish to parley as only David Milch can. Danny Huston brings gusto to the role of shady mayor Rudolph Schiller, in cahoots with Weston’s dad, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), on a big land deal. Told out of order, those scenes are frustratingly difficult to follow, but also standard enough that we get the gist. (The rest works better on second viewing, once we’ve worked out the chronology.)

In Holger’s absence, Vivienne transforms their scrappy patch of nothing into a proper home, with a thriving garden and plants blooming all around the porch. (She probably should have opened a flower stand in town, rather than find work at the saloon, but then Mortensen couldn’t have made his statement about what dastardly predators men can be.) When Holger returns, it’s to the scene that opened the film, just in time to watch Vivienne kick the bucket. She was the film’s spine, its fiery frontier wildflower, and without her, the movie settles into a kind of melancholy torpor. Weston’s out there somewhere, begging to be taught a lesson, but Mortensen — who, as an actor, expanded the Western in films such as “Jauja” and “The Road” — seems to have other ideas in mind.