"Slow West" is a different take on the Western genre that not even its two talented leads - Kodi Smit-McPhee and Michael Fassbender - can save. While the acting was on point, the rest of the film had a number of issues, making the John Maclean-directed movie one of the bigger let-downs for me at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.

Smit-McPhee stars as Jay, a love-struck teenager who leaves behind his life of privilege in Scotland to journey across the Wild West of 19th century America in search of his hometown sweetheart. The naïve Jay soon meets the mysterious and rugged Silas (Fassbender), who offers to escort Jay safely to his destination in exchange for money. As the pair traverses the dangerous Western frontier, we learn there is a reward for the heads of Jay's sweetheart and her father, and Silas - a bounty hunter - is using Jay to track them.

Maclean's first feature film opted for the lesser-used "intimate" style of Western storytelling. Gone are the sprawling wide-angled long-shots of the vast American frontier. Maclean favored tight close-ups and medium-shots to put emphasis on the characters, not the landscape. He favored telling an intimate story by including only a handful of characters in what felt like a closed-off world, choosing to do away with the genre-staple of bustling frontier towns with brothels, saloons and dozens of extras. It's a style that differs significantly from the Sergio Leone and the John Ford Westerns of yesteryear, including how Maclean opted to forego the iconic barren desert that characterized most traditional Westerns, but it's one that has been used before. The problem for Maclean was he didn't have the characters or the story to pull it off.


Smit-McPhee is a talented actor on the rise, and he turned in a solid performance as Jay. While Smit-McPhee didn't blow you away, he certainly didn't take anything away from the film as a whole. He carried his weight in every scene, capturing the nuances of a fish-out-of-water, 16-year-old boy - from Jay not realizing his love is clearly unrequited, to his over-trusting attitude that almost gets him stranded, to his first time drunk. The character doesn't have much of an arc, unfortunately, and in any other film, he'd be a tertiary character at best.  Jay never really grows out of the wide-eyed boy we're introduced to in the beginning. Even at the end, Jay's actions are more foolish than heroic, and his motivation is still the same: naïve love.

Fassbender is one of the most talented actors working today, but he must have taken this role either because he really wanted act in a Western - any Western - or because of his friendship with Maclean, whom he worked with previously. Silas didn't have any of the complexities that make for a juicy role; the only challenge Fassbender likely faced was perfecting his American accent. As with Smit-McPhee, my problem is with Fassbender's character, not his acting. Silas should be a "brute," a mysterious gunslinger, an antihero in the mold of Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name." To make the character work, Silas at least needed to be mysterious, which he wasn't because of Maclean's penchant (more on this later) to reveal too much. 

Moreover, Silas - and the movie - lost me during the character's pivotal scene. The scene took place at night when Silas and Jay crossed paths with Payne, Silas's former gang leader, leading to them all to decide to get drunk together. The scene was supposed to be the turning point for Silas, when the rogue gunslinger chooses to live for something more than just survival and to forego the bounty in favor of helping Jay and his sweetheart, who's also being pursued by other bounty hunters. The turning point was weak and the scene failed. You never felt the emotional turning point - in this case, it's a realization - for Silas, you didn't feel what suddenly gave a drunken Silas a revelatory moment strong enough to completely change his long-held values and to give him a newfound motivation to do what's right.  Instead, you got spoon-fed a few superficial lines of exposition about how Silas was nothing like the evil Payne, who only suggested Silas bring him in on the plan to use Jay to get the bounty. A legitimate reason for Silas' abrupt motivation to help Jay - he does ask if Jay loves the girl, but nothing prior in the film suggests Silas has a soft spot for romance - just wasn't there.

As for the story itself, it was lacking. What was meant to be humorous or light-hearted came off as campy. Maclean frequently either revealed too much or revealed something in a way that felt heavy-handed and forced. He tells us too much about the backstories of Silas and Jay, from Silas' voiceovers that stomp out any mystery surrounding what should be an enigmatic outlaw to the myriad of gimmicky flashbacks used to explain Jay's love for the girl and why the girl and her father fled Scotland.

Finally, the ending. It did nothing for me. In terms of the action, the climactic battle added nothing new or exciting to the genre. Maclean's choice at the end to cut to shots of every character that died in the movie was another example of his heavy-handedness. Yes, we get violence and senseless deaths were rampant in the Wild West.

The ending didn't offer anything in terms of the characters, either. Again - Jay's character arc is miniscule at best. The story initially appeared to be about Jay, but it was actually about Silas. That little "twist" made the ending even worse. It felt like fate rewarded Silas for being a passive protagonist at the end. The ending came across like he fell asleep during a gun fight and then woke up to discover, by default of being the last man standing, he had won the lotto, a prize he had never wanted before but one that he shrugs and accepts nonetheless.

Kudos to Maclean for having the ambition to try to pull off a different kind of Western for his first feature film, but he shot himself in the foot with the story and the characters. Nonetheless, it was a promising first feature, and Maclean proved he's a talented director worth keeping an eye on.

2 1/2 stars.

*This article is part of HNGN's continuing on-scene coverage of the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.