The Salvation (2014)

The Salvation arrives as a Danish Western, which is a phrase that promises more novelty than the film ultimately provides. Mads Mikkelsen plays Jon, a veteran of the 1864 Schleswig war who emigrates, loses his wife and son to stagecoach criminals, and then spends the remainder of the running time killing people in an orderly fashion. The cast is uniformly white and European, drawn from Denmark, Britain, and France, and no effort is made to diversify it. There are no queer characters, no queer subtext, and no gesture toward such matters. Eva Green's Madelaine is mute, abused, and largely acted upon until the final reel, when she shoots a man. That is revenge, not an argument.

The villainy here is corporate and municipal. A gang leader and a corrupt mayor conspire with the Standard Atlantic Oil Company to seize land rich in crude. This is the oldest plot in the Western toolbox, the land grab, and it carries no modern critique of capital. Oil is a commodity to be stolen, not a climate to be mourned. Native Americans appear only as a footnote in Delarue's military past, enemies he once fought, and the film has no interest in them beyond that. Madelaine's muteness is a wound and a plot mechanism, never an identity to be affirmed.

The film offers craft instead. The widescreen compositions are handsome, the Morricone-adjacent guitars are present and accounted for, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan chews the scenery with genuine menace. The themes arrive through gunfire and betrayal, never through sermonizing. Nobody stands up to explain the moral of the story. This is, by the standards of the current cultural moment, an unusually quiet film, and its silence is not a virtue it intended. It is simply a Western made by people who wanted to make a Western.