"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.
