The Salvation

[xrr rating=4.0/5]Mads Mikkelsen doesn’t have a particularly expressive face. Conveying emotions that range from worried to put-upon to bloodthirsty, he shifts his sharp features in barely perceptible directions. But his stoic presence gives him an authority that he uses to maximum effect whether he’s a Bond villain, a serial killer or, in director Kristian Levring’s old-school Western The Salvation, a man out for revenge. Levring was one of the Dogme 95 directors, and if his latest film doesn’t hold to their simple manifesto, it’s still an efficient, seemingly uncomplicated genre movie that thoroughly satisfies both its audience’s lowbrow need for visceral entertainment and the cineaste’s highbrow need for sharp composition, lush cinematography and taut editing. The film may seem like just another revenge fantasy at first, but it has to be thought about it a little harder.

Mikkelsen plays Jon, a Danish immigrant who has settled in the American West in the 1870s. Jon is a peaceful man, but he and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) are also steeled war veterans. The film begins at the station where Jon is picking up his wife and son, whom he has sent for from the homeland after working in America long enough to bring them over. Jon and his family are sitting in a coach across from another immigrant couple, but their fellow passengers are pulled off the coach to make room for a fateful exchange. Recently released from prison, Paul (Michael Raymond-James, who refused to chew off his own fingers for Werner Herzog in Jack Reacher) and his companion soon threaten Jon and his family, finally kicking Jon off the coach, killing his son and raping his wife. But the ex-con doesn’t realize who he’s messing with, and Jon soon has his revenge.

The poor Dane didn’t know who he was messing with either. He has avenged his family by killing a man who turns out to be the brother of Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a Wild West racketeer who takes protection money from the town in exchange for not killing them. Delarue demands two townspeople to kill in exchange for the two men he lost, and Mayor Keane (Jonathan Pryce) offers up an elderly grandmother and a double-amputee, lives which barely add up to one man for Delarue.

At this point the movie may sound like a frontier “A-Team” episode, but Levring and his crew create a dryly menacing atmosphere, and build tension with deft editing and tight compositions, which works particularly well in a sequence wherein Levring cuts back from footsteps that may or may not hide the vengeful hero as he defends himself from Delarue’s wrath.

The film doesn’t provide details of Danish customs or their assimilation into American life, but it’s not as if that’s expected from a genre picture. Yet that doesn’t mean the film has nothing to say about the immigrant experience. Its villains are the privileged establishment, meting out their own twisted justice at the expense of new arrivals. Jon’s struggle is that of the immigrant, underestimated and using wiles learned in a foreign war to cut his own bloody path to justice. Which makes the film’s metaphor that much more complicated – whose salvation are we talking about? The Salvation is an excellent entertainment that revels in Western movie cliches, its social commentary subtle and maybe a little subversive.