Michael Fassbender's Underrated 2015 Western Is Worth Revisiting
by Devin Meenan · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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Lots of modern Westerns take the adventurous romance out of the genre, like director John Maclean's 2015 "Slow West." A major hit at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category, and then made its way into theaters (with a simultaneous video-on-demand release). More than a decade on, "Slow West" remains one of the best Westerns of this century. And you can watch it on Netflix right now — although it's leaving soon, so act fast. It's also free, with ads, on YouTube.
"Slow West" lives up to its title with a leisurely pace, but it's also a tight 84-minute movie. In 19th century Colorado, a young Scottish man named Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) sets off in search of his supposed one true love, Rose (Caren Pistorius) — who left Scotland with a price on her head. Jay meets bounty hunter Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) by chance and Silas becomes his guide and guardian. They also run afoul of Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), leader of a gang Silas once belonged to; Payne is interested in collecting the bounty on Rose.
Smit-McPhee later appeared in the acclaimed 2021 Western "The Power of the Dog," which similarly paired him up with Benedict Cumberbatch just as "Slow West" does with him and Fassbender. In "The Power of the Dog," Smit-McPhee is a wolf in sheep's clothing, one who weaponizes his unassuming innocence. In "Slow West," that innocence is exactly what you get with Jay Cavendish. He has naive ideas about adventure and love — Rose never actually reciprocated his feelings, but he's convinced the grand gesture of tracking her down will sway her. While the frontier forces him to defend himself with a gun, it's clear throughout the film Jay isn't built for the gunslinging life.
John Maclean's path to Slow West
Jay's origins as a Scotsman traveling through America in "Slow West" are almost autobiographical for John Maclean, who is from Scotland himself. (Notably, while the parts of the film set in America were filmed in New Zealand, flashbacks to Scotland were filmed in the real country.) Speaking to the International Business Times in 2015, Maclean said how, when he first decided to write a Western, one of the first "seeds" of the story for him was to depict a frontier filled with European immigrants moving west. Jay and Rose are Scottish, Michael Fassbender uses his Irish accent to play Silas, and (without spoilers) Jay and Silas meet a Swedish family during their travels.
Unlike Jay, a newcomer to America, Maclean had seen plenty of America before making "Slow West" — which was what drew him to the Western: "After college [a few friends and I] took cars through America delivering them. So, I did a lot of traveling in America. That probably led to me wanting to do a Western."
"Slow West" was McLean's first feature film; before that, he'd been a musician and part of a group called The Beta Band, where he played keyboards and directed music videos. According to Maclean, Fassbender agreed to act in his short films because he'd been a fan of those Beta Band videos.
"He was shooting ['Inglourious Basterds'] at the time, so the fact that he even offered his services was a great thing," said Maclean to the BBC. Considering that creative partnership led to "Slow West," one of Michael Fassbender's best movies, the actor's judgment was sound.