The Salvation

Kristian Levring’s great Danish western draws less on the American classic than on Sergeo Leone’s operatic extension. Hence the soft-focus opening on a railroad station, as if the Leone set of Once Upon a Time in the West has receded in memory  — as the ideals of the American west have. Like Leone, Levring uses the western to examine contemporary America and how far it has strayed from its original ideals. Where Leone used the western to address America’s engagement in Viet Nam, Levring’s interest is America’s contamination by and sellout for — oil. 

The nation’s Edenic lure to immigrants figures in Jon and brother Peter coming to America to escape the ravages of Denmark’s war with Germany. After seven years Jon brings over his wife and son, only to have to imperil his and his brother’s lives to avenge their rape and murder. 

In the last shot the camera pulls back from the villain Delarue’s charred ruins of empire, revealing a landscape of primitive wooden structures drilling for oil. In the classic western the villain is the unvarnished outlaw or his civilized successor, the imperialist rancher or the banker. Here the villainy is in the oil oligarchy, the corporation that hires Delarue to drive out the settlers, buy up their land too cheaply, all the while maintaining the pretence of law and order. That is the new “civilization” in name only.

Delarue sells the town “protection” like an ur-Mafiosi. The germinal town has an undertaker mayor and a preacher sheriff — both emblematic — who cowardly submit to Delarue while futilely waiting for help from the remote feds. In an early scene the town serves up a legless man and a widow to try to appease Delarue’s vengeance. That surrender evokes Obama’s appeasement of Iran.  

We’ve met the oil in passing. It lurks under the town’s name, Black Creek. In a few shots it’s a burbling infernal pool, like a living evil force. It has contaminated the well water. Worse, it contaminates the roots of American society here, as it undercuts the town’s feeble attempt to bring civilization to the desert. It poisons the promise of freedom and equal opportunity that has lured generations of immigrants to America. And still does.

The film contrasts two pairs of brother. Delarue glosses over his wild brother’s tendency to rape and to murder, to justify his vengeance. Peter and Jon risk their own lives in each other’s defence, Jon finally driven to avenge Peter’s death. In morally opposite ways both prove themselves their brother’s keeper. 

The mute Madelaine comes to embody a more courageous and moral America than the town officials. Captured by savages, who cut out her tongue, then corrupted by the Delarues’  business, she tries to escape after Delarue forces himself on her. The corporate villains have brutalized her badly as the supposed “savages.” When the righteous citizens want to kill her Jon intervenes. By saving him from Delarue she has earned her salvation, as Jon earned his by avenging his loved ones’ murder. 

     Of the townsfolk only the murdered woman’s grandson moves to help Jon, fatally. He, Jon and Madelaine, by their active will and uncompromised values, earn the salvation that the town seems undeservedly to get. But those oil derricks suggest otherwise. The town has been saved from the Delarues but the more pervasive poison of the oil wealth looms. That brings us back from the wild west of myth to our too sadly real now.