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| Michael Fassbender stars in "Slow West." |
“Slow West” is the directorial debut of John Maclean and I can only imagine that he woke up one day with some kind of deep-seated need to combine his experience with unrequited love with his Wes Anderson fetish and then… make it a western? Or rather, whatever caricature of a western he’d conjured in a dream… a dream induced possibly by an absinthe bender. No, seriously.
However, it’s difficult for me to fault this artsy bit of film (it’s 84 minutes) for blatantly defying the tropes of the typical western—that I can get on board with; westerns have been done, done again, been shot in the head, and then have gotten back up to John Wayne themselves back across the desert for one more whiskey. But it’s far too obvious that its primary purpose was that. And it wasn’t terribly convincing. Because a film can’t stand on a quirky idea alone. It needs a story—one that, you know, makes sense.
