Viggo Mortensen Western The Dead Don’t Hurt Isn’t as Feminist as He Hopes

Viggo Mortensen has been promoting The Dead Don’t Hurt, his second directorial project, as a “feminist western.” It is clear that no one on his team has informed him that a feminist western requires more critical thinking than simply putting a woman in a lead role. Filling your film with genre tropes without subverting them, or adding new ideas, is only that: Filling your film with genre tropes. The Dead Don’t Hurt is stuffed to the gills with western tropes, with not a whole lot to add to the genre, especially in terms of furthering feminism onscreen. It may not be the worst western in the world in terms of women’s rights, but that is hardly a reason to commend a film that’s only missing the whore with the heart of gold. 

Mortensen stars as the carpenter Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant who largely keeps to himself in his Nevada ranch house in the 1860s. Olsen’s lone wolf tendencies are tested when he instantly falls for Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), a flower seller living in San Francisco, herself a French Canadian immigrant. Le Coudy is seeing a rich aristocrat at the time, fairly seriously in fact, but she is the kind of independent woman who can’t be held down by any man, even a rich one. She refuses to wed, but agrees to leave with the cowboy Olsen back to his Nevada home. Soon, Vivienne is homemaking on his ranch. She grows roses and takes a job waitressing in the local tavern. 

The couple’s new, idyllic life together abruptly ends when Holger feels compelled to join the Union Army as the Civil War explodes into a more fiery conflict. Why someone like Holger would be so bound to the idea of fighting an American war is completely beyond me. Perhaps to our modern sensibilities, joining the Union to fight against slavery makes sense, but this logic applies less to a solitary man of the time like Holger. He leaves Vivienne stranded in the Nevada town of Elk Flats, which proves itself to be more corrupt than she’d originally imagined. The mayor, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston), is intent on protecting his financial interests at all costs, even if that comes at the price of the safety of his citizens. This includes Vivienne, who is ruthlessly pursued by the mean-spirited Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), son of the mayor’s business partner, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt). With no one to protect her, Vivienne must fend for herself. The story is told non-chronologically, beginning with the end, so by the time Vivienne is introduced, we already know her tragic fate. 

Yes, Vivienne is a strong woman who stands up for herself in a crooked town populated with evil men, but her existence in The Dead Don’t Hurt is defined more by the lack of Olsen in her life, and by the presence of nefarious men who wish her harm, than by her own merits. She spends most of the film not fighting back, but pining for her man to return from the war (albeit, she does so with a brave look on her face). By its end, the protagonist’s arc is ultimately given not to Vivienne, but to Olsen, who must reckon with his decision to leave Vivienne to the wolves, and move on. The Dead Don’t Hurt is more about the effects of violence against Vivienne on Olsen, not on Vivienne, who is a character in Olsen’s story, not her own. This makes for a rather conventional western with regards to sexual politics, not a radical one.

Westerns have always been prime political vehicles for all sides of the spectrum. Western films with strong female main characters have been in the canon since the 1950s, and some subverted sexist genre tropes in more daring, visually dynamic ways than Mortensen’s project. In 1954, Joan Crawford starred as Vienna in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. Vienna is a woman who owned her own saloon on prime real estate, right next to the future railroad, therefore needing to defend her business against wealthier landowners hungry for a piece of the action. At no point is Vienna waiting around for a man to come back from the war to protect her—in the climax of the film, she asserts her dominance, which unfortunately, is never the case for poor Vivienne. 

As is the case with many actors turned directors, Mortensen seems mostly preoccupied with performance. Krieps is a blessing for any director, but especially for Mortensen. Krieps saves the whole thing from total disaster with her down-to-earth yet powerful performance. On paper, Vivienne is just another ballsy frontier woman scarred by sexual violence, but Krieps brings her own eccentric brand of truth to the role. Somehow, Krieps always knows exactly when to apply weight and when to add levity to Vivienne’s words.

With The Dead Don’t Hurt, Mortensen’s second directorial effort, he’s made a name for himself as a filmmaker with a knack for casting strong performers. But in order for Mortensen to be seen as a more serious filmmaker, he’ll need to question the expression of politics in his films. Whose voices are at the center, and why? 

In an enlightening coincidence, Mortensen also starred as a Danish gunslinger in this year’s Eureka, a three act pseudo-western from Lisandro Alonso that deconstructs colonialism in the genre. Eureka may have less commercial appeal, but its feminist politics are both more radical and more coherent (which is really saying something, considering its highly ambiguous, bordering on trippy, ending). In a twist, the black-and-white film that Mortensen has been starring in is just that: A film, playing on network television, being watched by the real protagonists, modern-day Lakota women played by Sadie Lapontie and Alaina Clifford. Mortensen’s gunslinger is rendered irrelevant, decentered and further fictionalized. By shirking our expectations regarding who is the lead of the story, Alonso subverts the main trope of the western genre (the cowboy at the helm). In Mortensen’s own film, the trope is alive and well.

Director: Viggo Mortensen
Writer: Viggo Mortensen
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Vicky Krieps
Release Date: September 8th, 2023 (Toronto International Film Festival)

Brooklyn-based film writer Katarina Docalovich was raised in an independent video store and never really left. Her passions include sipping lime seltzer, trying on perfume and spending hours theorizing about Survivor. You can find her scattered thoughts as well as her writing on Twitter.