It is hard not to feel a little surge of pity, as if for a frail creature set loose in the snow, whenever some well-meaning distributor releases a new western.
No genre has passed so suddenly from dominance to obsolescence and, despite the successes of Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves, the cowboy film has stubbornly refused to rise from its unvisited grave.
Seraphim Falls, a harsh, ostentatiously metaphysical addition to the canon, is unlikely to reverse the decline, but it remains a bracing piece of work featuring strong performances and striking landscapes. The picture involves a pursuit. Liam Neeson's Carver, aquiline and weather-worn, has taken some terrible grudge against the equally taciturn Gideon - who looks as craggy as Pierce Brosnan is able to - and, in the company of four unreliable henchmen, sets out to run his adversary to ground.
The picture begins with a confrontation in snowy mountains and, after passing through plains, rocky outcrops and every other conceivable natural environment bar lava flows, takes us to a final altercation on an endless desert.
In the course of the long confrontation, our sympathies wax and wane. Gideon initially seems the more moral of the two. Whereas his antagonist is willing to murder his own collaborators to further his aims, Gideon, taking shelter with a young girl and her widowed father, allows signs of an inner gentleness to leak out. As time progresses, however, we begin to suspect that there may be secrets in his past awful enough to shock even James Bond.
Seraphim Falls, like so many based around a violent rivalry, eventually concludes that its two combatants, by devoting themselves to each other's destruction, have gradually become one symbiotic organism. If that sounds pretentious to you, then you had best stay well away from the last act.
After a terrific opening hour, whose rugged turns recall The Outlaw Josey Whales, the picture begins to drift into the druggy, netherworld of such allegorical westerns as El Topo and High Plains Drifter. It requires real flair and commitment to pull off that sort of outlaw surrealism and, sad to tell, David Von Ancken, a first-time director, does not yet have those aptitudes.
Does a ghostly old Indian spout gnomic aphorisms? You (and the spirits of your ancestors) can bet on it.
DONALD CLARKE
