Alex Cox’s Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol intentionally ended his 1842 novel mid-sentence, which probably appealed to a rule-breaker like prominent micro-indie filmmaker Alex Cox. Gogol also intentionally burned the mid-section before his death. That gives dramatic adapters a lot of leeway to fill the holes. However, Cox probably takes the biscuit for taking liberties with his Spaghetti Western-inspired Dead Souls, opening today in Los Angeles.

In Gogol’s source novel, Chichikov was buying dead serfs from landowners, who would otherwise be forced to pay taxes on them until the next Russian census, so he could use them as collateral for a huge loan that he would then abscond and default on. Strindler, whose name sounds aptly like “swindler” wants to buy the names of dead Mexican migrant workers for some similarly nefarious purpose. Not really a spoiler alert: Strindler’s end game lacks Gogol’s brilliant satirical logic.

However, Cox proves to be his own best asset, portraying the fastidious yet sardonic—and profoundly corrupt and corrupting—Strindler, with wry panache. Much like his Russian analogue, Cox’s conman goes about his episodic business, holding up a mirror to the hypocrisies and prejudices of the Arizona bordertown.  To a large extent, the rest of the cast of characters consist of broad stereotypes. However, Strindler is a character who is a real character.

As a surprise bonus, Sarah Vista also has a truly standout scene portraying “The Widow,” who performs a knockout rendition of “Streets of Laredo” during a surreal musical interlude. Rather drolly, Strindler will later be completely baffled when he is accused of forging the widow’s last will and testament, in a sly nod to a plot point from the missing section of Gogol’s novel, referenced in the third act and the author’s surviving notes. Cox also name drops William Walker, the subject of his big Hollywood bomb Walker, one of the few 1980s films nobody remembers nostalgically, due to its anti-Americanism.

Dead Souls is deliberately eccentric in a hit-or-miss way. However, its gritty throwback Euro-western aesthetic is pitch perfect. This is the kind of film fans of Sergei Corbucci will dig. The attempt to translate and update Gogol’s social satire is iffy at best, but Cox absolutely captures the grungy naturalism and moral ambiguity of Spaghetti westerns (and their European cousins). Recommended warts-and-all for fans of the subgenre, Cox’s Dead Souls opens today (7/22) in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo.