Why do people need guns? Why were guns invented? An explosion in a small chamber and a hunk of lead with only one way out is a recipe for murder. Self-defense, self-destruction, military, terrorist, duel or sniper, the point of the exercise is a kill. Very scary. The United States is awash with guns, due to the moronic equations gun = freedom, or self-protection, or peace of mind. None of these questions are considered in the Danish shoot-em-up The Salvation (2014), opening at Opera Plaza Cinemas on Friday, March 6.
The film is very easy on the eyes, showcasing Nordic heartthrob Mads Mikkelsen and, in a supporting role construed as a lead worth second billing, the ever-appetizing Eva Green. Jens Schlosser's camera bathes the Ikea-inflected Wild West in warm hues, caresses twilit weeds and burnishes dry grass in a sumptuous paean to location-shooting in South Africa. Diana Cilliers' costumes are dreamy confections: rugged and soiled in saturated colors, tailored to a T.
The film is even easier on the brain. Having grown up on Westerns, we're as familiar with the tropes of stagecoach, train, general store, and jailhouse as Agatha Christie fans are of library, drawing room, village fete, and the Vicar's. Each burnished Ikea trope is filmed at an iconic pace that will leave no viewer behind. The jolts come at the cuts between scenes. Some edits establish symmetry, as when Mads burying his wife and child is juxtaposed with Eva staring cryptically into her husband's freshly dug grave. Gosh, will these two glamorous pioneers overcome a Hatfield-McCoy revenge set-up to ride off into the sunset together?
Other edits trick the viewer into thinking one thing has happened when in fact the other thing has, a ploy Christie used in her books to move narrative along while befuddling a reader's sense of narrative stability. Galloping cuts complicate a straightforward tale not of salvation, but of slaughter. When the good guy kills a bad guy who turns out to have an even worse brother, the good guy must prove he's the baddest of em all. This is where guns come in. Plenty of pretty period handguns and rifles, plenty of ammo, and don't forget the kerosene. Bang, bang, bang. Guess who survives.
There are only four women in the movie, three of whom appear only as long as it takes to establish a plot point: the blonde wife fresh off the boat from Denmark; a self-sacrificing grandma of the town Black Creek; a housewife turned widow. And then there's Eva Green, who has no lines. This is actually an interesting solution to the French actress' wonky English accent, if indeed anyone was ever bothered by her exotic linguistics. Early on, her ruffian husband sits across a stagecoach from Mads, explaining that his princess has been mute ever since Indians cut out her tongue to silence her screams after they killed her parents.
There are no Native Americans in sight, only this graphic image from the lips of a white rapist, whose story goes unquestioned. This throwaway slander stuck in my craw. The racism and misogyny enshrined in three lines of script is a capsule version of the American Empire's useful lie: Savages must be eradicated to protect white women's virtue. Absent Indians are to blame for everything bad that happens. Good men are said to have turned evil after killing too many savages. There's a clear Iraq parallel in Black Creek, named for the crude-oil deposits whose ominous bubbles foreground several shots.
Favoring action over reality, screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen deploys rape not to enlighten but to denigrate, as a stock melodramatic event that turns heroes into demons without converting anyone to feminism. First, the off-screen rape of the blonde Danish wife sets the revenge plot in motion. Later, Princess is condemned to a gang rape by henchmen. Serious unreality sets in when Eva appears several scenes on, fully clothed and fresh as a daisy but understandably irked that her wrists are tied to bedposts. All in a day's shooting for an actress whose unparalleled smoldering made me a fan, but what does rape matter in the immoral universe of this neo-Viking saga?
Eva Green's missing tongue allows director Kristian Levring to film her as a damaged, disdainful, yet docile enigma with nothing to say beyond smoldering eyes, heaving bosom, raven tresses, and ultimately, the under-lever on her Winchester repeating rifle. Even the sensitive Mads Mikkelsen is reduced to an ever-ready cog in the great karmic wheel of nihilistic plot that looks like a videogame version of a graphic novel staged by re-enactors obsessed with authenticity in ballistics, but indifferent to human history. If M.M. isn't careful, he'll wind up as James Bond.