Slow West and Mad Max: Fury Road are both excellent films, and both tell stories of long, relentless chases across empty landscapes. Yet they feel very different. While Fury Road races with frenetic energy and features wild action, Slow West walks at a horse’s pace and focuses on character and dialogue. Fury Road could be called Fast East, while Slow West could be called Gentle Jay: Love Road.
Slow West tells the story of Jay Cavendish, a young Scottish gentleman trying to reach his beloved, Rose, in frontier America. She and her father fled there after accidentally killing Jay’s father, a prominent lord. Jay is a rich and a naïve romantic. This wilderness full of outlaws and bounty hunters is not a safe place for him. One such rough man of dubious motive, Silas, becomes his chaperone (for a price), escorting Jay west toward Rose. What Jay doesn’t know is that Rose and her father have a bounty on their heads for the death of Jay’s father, and several hunters are after the prize.
Slow West uses the imagery and tropes of western movies to set up expectations, but then it constantly subverts those expectations. The film is full of surprises which are, at once, funny and meaningful, all leading towards a shocking end.
Silas is played by Michael Fassbender as the familiar, taciturn, close-to-the-vest, western man. The more interesting performance is Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jay, the vulnerable fish out of water. He projects a simple goodness and innocence in the midst of a greedy, violent world, trusting the kindness of strangers and composing poetry as they travel through a dangerous forest. Every night as he and Silas campi out under the stars, Jay enjoys the adventure while Silas resents the necessity. Smit-McPhee is able to make his vulnerability endearing where other actors might just seem clueless.
(The next two paragraphs include SPOILERS for Slow West. – editor)
Smit-McPhee gives the better performance, yet Silas is the more interesting character. The internal conflict of the story happens inside him, as he weighs whether or not to tell Jay about the bounty and what to do when they find Rose and her father. At the beginning, I was sure that Silas was playing Jay for his money, planning to kill Rose and take the bounty. I thought the movie would end with a last-minute enlightenment, probably as Silas saw the purity of young love. But, Slow West is more subtle than that. There’s no clear transformation scene, but by the end the trip has changed Silas. He’s composing poetry too, and enjoying the ride for its own sake.
Silas’s character arc shows us a different kind of conversion from what we often see. There’s no new information that changes his mind, and he’s certainly not impressed by Jay. His perspective on Jay moves from exploitation, to pity, to love. The light of Jay’s romanticism shines into Silas’s cynicism, and he realizes that a world too dangerous for Jay to survive in is no good world at all. So he changes his course to make his contribution to this new, better world.
Which leads me back to the Fury Road comparison. Both films put civilization up against savagery, longing for the former while showing the latter as the present reality. Both imply that a truly civilized world would be one safe enough for romantics and idealists to survive and thrive. Silas knows that Jay is a fool in the real world, but he wants him to be wise. Better to be a fool in a good world than a sage in an evil one.
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