Streaming Now: ‘Slow West’

In the superb 2015 film “Slow West,” Silas (Michael Fassbender) repeatedly mounts his horse and mutters, “Let’s drift.” The camera always tracks him moving from right to left on screen - heading West.

He ambles alongside Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a baby-faced teen from Scotland who was traveling toward the Pacific with the book “Ho! For the West!” as his only reference until he ran into the somewhat reformed bounty hunter, Silas.

Jay seeks the runaway Rose (Caren Pistorius), the woman he loved back on the Scottish moors (she, it’s important to note, did not share Jay’s Romeo and Juliet-inspired ardor). Though she’s seen and heard in just a couple scenes, Pistorius’s performance makes you understand completely how she launched Jay’s ship westward.

Silas knows something Jay does not: there’s a $2,000 bounty on Rose’s head, and he’s going to collect it… unless Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), the leader of a scraggly pack of hellions, beats him to the prize.

Jay rides through the entire film as an outsider - he has immigrant eyes, full of wonder at the dreamers he encounters in the New World. He gapes at a starving Swedish family, a German ethnographer studying Americans’ “selective nostalgia” toward Native Americans, and a troupe of French-speaking African musicians.

Scottish writer/director John Maclean’s tight screenplay has a concise description of Jay’s reality: the East is “violence and suffering” while the West is “dreams and toil.” The violence in the film, while realistic, is often humorous and even gentle, in the style of the Coen Brothers’ “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” While Payne’s murderousness is unquestionable, when he offers Jay and Silas a bottle absinthe the exact color of Fassbender’s eyes, the characters all have a nice evening together.

Robbie Ryan’s crystalline cinematography captures mountains touched with snow and valleys thick with lupine - perhaps the scenery is so gorgeous because the film was shot in New Zealand. But, then again, the West is mostly an idea anyway. It’s a romantic notion that carries Jay across the ocean and over a continent - he dodges bullets and arrows thanks to what can only be called grace.

When he catches up with Rose at last, in her cabin amidst the amber-waving grain, we realize that Jay’s fancy is universal - the fresh clapboard cabin tugs at the heartstrings even as its riddled with bullets. Against all expectations, “Slow West” turns out to be an 84-minute epic about the American dream.