Some actors seem made for westerns, even if they rarely appear in them. Viggo Mortensen, stalwart leading man of weathered good looks and appealing reserve, certainly qualifies. But now that he’s written and directed one, “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” Mortensen’s second feature behind and in front of the camera, he has generously shown us that the luminous Vicky Krieps belongs in that category, too.
The supremely watchable pairing of these magnetic actors is what helps lift this lyrically crafted frontier love story above the usual efforts to restore the genre’s appeal. The gently blossoming match of a strong-willed woman of French-Canadian origin with a taciturn, self-reliant Danish immigrant is this film’s beating heart, from their initial spark in San Francisco to their settling in a ramshackle cabin on the outskirts of a one-saloon Nevada town called Elk Flats. This being a western, though, the specter of death and violence is never far away.
Mortensen even starts with a pair of grim scenes that in other films might be endings — one a private loss, the other a public shootout. They trigger the film’s temporally loose narrative tapestry, in which flashbacks (which have their own flashbacks) begin to feel as if the playing out of the past is this tale’s true present, the way it might feel to someone in mourning. For big-city flower seller Vivienne (Krieps), who can take care of herself and relishes childhood memories of idolizing Joan of Arc, the attraction to .
