Across the River and Into the Trees

From the perspective of great literature, Venice is the city to go when death is near. In fact, Hemingway’s Venetian novel is often compared to the classic Thomas Mann novella. Both focus on dying men who spend their final days pondering a younger beauty. In Hemingway’s novel, Col. Richard Cantwell is more directly involved with the young and noble-born Renata Contari. In this adaptation, their relationship is less romantic and therefore arguably healthier. Unfortunately, his heart is just as weak in Paula Ortiz’s adaptation of Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees, which releases this Friday on VOD.

Col. Cantwell must be a difficult patient, considering he refuses to follow the advice of Danny Huston (playing his doctor, Captain Wes O’Neil). He insists on taking a duck-hunting trip outside Venice, so the best O’Neil can do is assign him a driver, Sgt. Jackson. Despite the grief he takes, the NCO still appreciates a veteran battlefield officer like Cantwell.

For his part, Cantwell most certainly appreciates a woman like Contari, despite his grim state of mind. Their paths just keep crossing, maybe not so accidentally. It was coincidence that Cantwell had hoped to buy a set of vintage hunting rifles from her cash-poor, but too proud to be cooperative mother. After that, it is largely sympathetic attraction, and perhaps Contari’s passive-aggressive hope to undermine her arranged marriage. She is betrothed to an old family friend, but he is not half the man battle-scarred Cantwell is.

It is pretty easy to guess Cantwell’s real business in Venice, especially if you have any familiarity with Hemingway’s life and work. Nonetheless, the world-weary officer also hopes to conclude another piece of unfinished business, by uncovering the mass burial site of a group of partisans executed by the SS, for distinctly personal reasons.

Ortiz and screenwriter Peter Flannery definitely scrubbed Hemingway’s novel for contemporary viewers. They water down Cantwell’s romance with Contari to essentially a platonic friendship, with close dancing and maybe one or two kisses. They also completely expurgate all references to Stonewall Jackson, from whom the title came.

However, Hemingway readers will appreciate the way Flannery reliably recreates the cadences of his dialogue. This is also an appropriately boozy and smoky film. Ortiz seems to take inspiration from The Third Man, nearly transmuting Hemingway into film noir, in much the same tradition as Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel’s adaptations of “The Killers.”

It works pretty well, especially considering how fully Ortiz and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe capitalize on the Venice locations. Of course, it greatly helps that we can only see and not smell the dank Italian cultural capitol.

Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt

There was no shortage of violence in the Old West, but there was also a lot of quiet loneliness. There are plenty of both in Viggo Mortensen’s new revisionist western, but the lonely moments are safer. No matter how revisionist it might be, revenge still needs to be taken in director-screenwriter-composer-co-star Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt, which opens this Friday in theaters.

The title has a spaghetti western ring to it, but the vibe is more Heaven’s Gate. Just about every man Vivienne Le Coudy meets is an exploiter, except Holger Olsen. That is why she ran off with him so quickly. Unfortunately, we know it will end tragically, because the film starts with Olsen mourning Le Coudy at her death bed. The ensuing flashbacks explain why Olsen will be gunning for Weston Jeffries, the violently entitled son of wealthy Alfred Jeffries, who runs the nearest town with the brazenly corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller.

As a veteran in his native Denmark, Olsen believed he could enlist for the $100 bonus, fight for his new country, and return home after a relatively short time. Le Coudy is rightly skeptical, but she lets him go anyway. Unfortunately, that leaves her to fend for herself in the lawless town. Of course, the years drag by, until Olsen finally returns to meet Vincent, the son he never knew he “had.” Despite the circumstances, Olsen and the little boy quickly develop a rapport, so the soldier-turned-sheriff will always protect his son, even after the sins done to Le Coudy cause further physical decline and death.

Dead Don’t Hurt is about as slow as a western can get and still be a western. It still has all the elements, particularly the striking landscape—mostly shot on-location in Durango, Mexico. Mortensen can definitely play the strong silent type, so he perfectly cast himself as Olsen. As usual, he slow-burns like nobody’s business.

Yet, Vicky Krieps is the true lead as Le Coudy. She brings a lot of strength and sensitivity to the part. Watching her work in The Dead Don’t Hurt gives real sense of the dangers women faced on the frontier. However, it is worth remembering conditions for women weren’t much better in the Old World—and often they were worse. Ask the women of the shtetls about the Cossacks. Wherever you were, life in the late 19^th Century was just brutish and short.

Consecration, Starring Danny Huston

This troubled convent sits amid the only independent land in Scotland—because it is owned by the Vatican. However, being reasonable people, the Church still allows the local police to investigate a brutal murder-suicide committed there. They even open their doors to Grace O’Rourke, whose brother allegedly killed a priest, before taking his own life. Skeptical of their story, she is determined to uncover the truth in Christopher Smith’s Consecration, which opens today in New York.

O’Rourke and her brother Michael endured a harrowing childhood, but they went their separate ways in adulthood. She is an outspoken atheist optometrist, while he was involved with rigorously devout Catholic sect. She therefore refuses to believe Michael killed himself. Sure enough, she uncovers inconsistencies in the handing of his body that lead directly back to the severe Mother Superior.

That does not sit well with Father Romero, who is visiting from the Vatican to re-consecrate the chapel. He is not amused with the Mother Superior’s questionable initiative, but he also seems to have his own agenda. Nevertheless, he encourages O’Rourke to keep digging, including research into the convent’s colorful crusader-era history.

Smith clearly took a great deal of inspiration from films like Mother Joan of the Angels, because he revels in similar imagery of prostrate nuns. As Kawalerowicz, Smith and co-screenwriter Laurie Cook convincingly suggest the distinction between devotion and madness is sometimes difficulty to draw. However, like any halfway effective demonic thriller, Consecration leaves us with the unsettling understanding that evil, as understood in Biblical terms, is something that is tangibly real.

Nevertheless, Smith is no William Peter Blatty, either in his capacity to get under viewers’ skin or his faith in the Church to combat the forces of darkness. Frankly, Consecration is about as anti-Church as a religious horror film can get and still function to any degree.