It feels like a new invention for these socially aware times, but the feminist western has a pedigree that stretches back beyond that thrilling moment in the mid-’90s when cornerstone subgenre masterpieces “Bad Girls” and “The Quick and the Dead” were released within a year of each other. (Yes, I’m joking about the description of either of those two titles as a masterpiece.) In many ways the western form, though indelibly associated with the saddle-weary low-slung machismo of the John Wayne/John Ford collaborations, has always lent itself to strong female roles, whether it’s Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray‘s “Johnny Guitar,” Barbara Stanwyck in Anthony Mann‘s “The Furies” (which actually is a masterpiece) or Anne Bancroft in Ford’s own swan song “7 Women.”
But what’s notable about all of those films, and many of the more recent titles that fit the profile, is that a great deal of their internal tension and drama comes from their female characters trying to find a way for their strength to co-exist with their femininity in an environment where gender binaries are iron-clad, and women aren’t real women unless they’re weak. Dutch director Martin Koolhoven‘s expansive, bloody, and beautifully shot “Brimstone” plots a different course, earning its feminist credentials by favoring the perspective of a woman (an excellent Dakota Fanning) whose strength lies not in how she challenges or co-opts male hegemony, but in how she negotiates it, and manages to survive its most gruesomely punishing excesses. She never abandons frocks for chaps, or learns how to Annie Oakley her way through adversity, but Fanning’s Liz is a progressive portrayal of personal resilience against overwhelming, perhaps even demonic, odds.
The demon in question is The Reverend, played by Guy Pearce as a kind of sublimation of every Robert Mitchum role ever, but especially that of Mitchum’s iconically evil preacher in “Night of the Hunter.” As the film begins, with a chapter titled “Revelations,” Liz is happily married and raising her husband’s surly son and her own devoted daughter on a remote ranch. She is a midwife, successfully delivering a child in the film’s opening sequence, to the gratitude of the new father. And she is mute, communicating through sign language translated by her daughter. A mute woman is a mystery, but it’s to the film’s credit that its unusual structure, which is comprised of successive chapters that jump back in time to reveal earlier events in Liz’s life, solves that mystery (in one of the many gory and graphic sequences) without trying to “solve” Liz, who retains a degree of personhood and agency right until an epilogue ending that unsatisfyingly sells her out.
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The first notes of oncoming doom are struck when Liz, at church with her family, reacts with abject terror to hearing the new preacher’s Dutch-accented voice, as he invokes the eternal hellfire of damnation on all sinners from the pulpit. She tries to slip away, but is stymied by a local woman going into labor at that moment, with Liz forced to attempt the delivery in the church. But the baby’s head is too big and when her relatives refuse to make the choice between saving the baby or saving the mother, Liz chooses, wrongly in the eyes of the God-fearing and superstitious town, to save the mother. Her husband embraces her later and tells her it wasn’t her fault and she agrees: it was the Reverend’s.
This opening segment is probably the strongest, because it is the most ambivalent. While later chapters will necessarily explore and explain the history between her and the Reverend, here the subtext of a more generalized paranoiac distrust and fear of women (and the arcane secrets of their childbearing bodies), has most texture. We are not sure yet if Pearce’s Reverend really does have uncanny mystical powers, or if, indeed, Fanning’s Liz has somehow transgressed against God and is now facing retribution. But the ease with which he can turn the whole parish against her suggests a pre-existing and deeply held suspicion of capable women that the Bible can be seen to condone, if you choose your readings selectively enough. Coupled with a score that admirably eschews traditional Morricone-style western flourishes in favor of a dark-tinged mystery or thriller vibe (the composer is Tom Holkenborg, here going by his more respectable-sounding real name, rather than nom de guerre Junkie XL) and rich, evocative photography from DP Rogier Stoffers, the ambiguity builds up a brooding, doom-laden atmosphere. Then the subtle gothic melodrama cues give way to unsubtle horror, including a man being strangled with his own intestines, and we launch into the catalogue of terror, trauma and torture (often upsettingly graphic) that is Liz’s backstory.
In a way it’s a shame that film builds backwards, because while it adds layers of tricksy narrative intrigue, that trajectory somewhat simplifies the thematic texture as the movie wears on. And it does feel long and episodic, like it could have been a short miniseries as easily as a movie, with the each new chapter introducing new characters with self-contained arcs: the brothel keeper Frank (Paul Anderson), the prostitute friend (Carla Juri), Liz’s younger self (Emilia Jones), her mother (Carice Van Houten) and her injured-outlaw first crush (Kit Harington). And there is also the let-down of that final section, when having been so careful and methodical until now, Koolhoven, who also wrote the script, loses some of his narrative rigor, flubs the final showdown and turns the screw just one too many times in the unnecessary epilogue. More’s the pity, because until then, the absorbing and uncompromising “Brimstone” is a visceral and elegantly grimy vision of an Old West where money, religion, power, and politics may be the domains of men, but survival is a woman. And survival, with spirit intact however broken the body, is victory. [B-]
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