Cruel for love
In the new Zellner brothers film Damsel, misguided characters stumble through lush settings, and try to sell us on the idea that there is something worthwhile in dressing a western with modern ideas about obsession, feminism, and family. The brothers deserve credit for the attempt, but they fail to find a focus on a clear message or point of view.
Westerns have, oddly, become a very durable genre for lighthanded, if effective experimentation. From the beautifully brutal High Plains Drifter, through the overwrought Little Big Man, and onto the mud-caked McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the genre began experimenting with moral relativism and historical revisionism. Since then, every few years, we enjoy what seems to be a plate of equal parts traditional and unorthodox examples. Along with Damsel, in 2018, Hostiles, Sweet Country, and Woman Walks Ahead will arrive in our theaters.
In Damsel we meet the exquisitely-visaged and attired Samuel Alabaster, played by the exquisitely-visaged and model-proportioned Robert Pattinson. Pattinson is as fun to look at as the name “Samuel Alabaster” is fun to repeat. His deep set eyes and compact frame carry a few more years than the ghost-white wasp of Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. But now, as then, if he locks his gaze on the camera for more than a few seconds, it wants to melt in his arms.
Off his spectacular performance in Good Time, Pattinson seems these days to be enjoying his time away from the Hollywood limelight. The question seems valid: where would Pattinson have gone after Twilight? Superhero films? Rom coms? Apparently he decided to explore characters who have a extraordinary ability to deny their realities.
In Damsel, Alabaster arrives on the frontier with a trunk full of surprisingly impressive clothes, a pygmy horse named Butterscotch, and the fervent wish that Penelope (Mia Wasikowska) will offer her hand in marriage.
Events intercede in ways that the film’s script, also written by the brothers, assume will play out like a modern survival tale overlaid with rugged scenery and ornery frontier eccentrics. The problems arise when we are asked to accept Penelope — who we believe just wants to get married and have some hard-bitten babies — reacting to events more like a single woman in contemporary New York City than a frontier tough cookie.
Further confusing matters are why supporting characters Parson Henry (Robert Forster) and Rufus (played by co-director Nathan Zellner) seem so in awe of Penelope’s beauty that they fail to see the control she has over them.
Wasikowska plays Penelope like a survivor who learns she can survive without the men in her life, with their troubled certainties and their assumptions of superiority. But she’s only given the flimsiest rationales to exert her independence, and, as the film concludes, she hasn’t earned the right to her final actions.
Ultimately Damsel will probably be remembered as an initial step in Pattinson’s journey away from teen hunk to respectable actor. It’s just too bad that the step couldn’t have been on top of a better film.
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Damsel opens today in select Bay Area theaters.
https://youtu.be/B6SwtHtpIDo
