SLOW WEST

"Slow West" may announce itself as an art-house western and one hailing from New Zealand rather than Hollywood at that, but it is still magnificent and not simply one of the best films I've seen this year but one of the great westerns. It may signal its young writer/director John Maclean, (making his feature debut), as being in thrall of his elders, and some might say at this stage, his betters as well as taking his cues from the likes of "McCabe and Mrs Miller" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" but here is a film full of imagination as well as virtuoso technique that merits serious critical attention. There is also a large helping of "True Grit" to its plot with young greenhorn Kodi Smit-McPhee journeying West in the company of bounty hunter and killer Michael Fassbender in search of his true love, encountering other bounty hunters, outlaws and Indians on the way.


Dialogue is sparse and poetical with both Smit-McPhee and Fassbender acting as our narrators, very much in the style of early Malick while the film is as visually gorgeous and as inventive as anything in the Malick oeuvre, (the DoP is Robbie Ryan). There is also a terrific score by Jed Kurzel. The two leads are first-rate and there's a wonderfully laid-back performance from Ben Mendelsohn as one of the films many villains, (indeed, everyone in this film is a killer of one kind or another). If the territory it explores isn't particularly new, (even the surreal asides feel somehow familiar), Maclean's handling of the material is outstanding and scene after scene lodges in the memory. In a year that has also seen Tommy Lee Jones' magnificent "The Homesman", who says the western is dead?