Damsel’s Distress: It Feels Like an Extended Comedy Sketch

Directors riffing on classic genres often have an unearned sense of superiority. Alas, that seems to be the case with David and Nathan Zellner, whose Western pastiche Damsel lands at the Belcourt this week. It strives for the dark comedy, tonal changes, and simultaneous embrace of gravitas and goofiness that the Coen Brothers often achieve. If the Zellner brothers (whose previous film Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter was about a Japanese woman who thought Fargo’s plot was a true story) are attempting to critique certain old-fashioned Hollywood tropes, they seem unaware that Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray did a much better job of that with their Westerns back in the 1950s.

 Pioneer Samuel Alabaster (Robert Pattinson) travels through the West with the goal of marrying his longtime love, Penelope (Mia Wasikowska). The constantly drunk Parson Henry (co-director David Zellner) and miniature horse Butterscotch come along for the journey. As Samuel makes his way, certain roles shift, and the plot takes a very unexpected turn at the halfway point.

In one major misfire, the directors made the dreadful decision to play a murder for comedy. Fortunately, Zellner’s performance emphasizes his character’s shakiness and a realistic sense of how hard it must be to work oneself up to kill a man. But as a filmmaker, he’s cool with sight gags involving a man missing the top of his head continuing to urinate — with a related penis joke being the cherry on top. Of all recent films, Deadpool 2 surprisingly treads the line between dark humor — even about violence — and having a heart much better. 

In general, David Zellner proves himself a much better actor than director. His looks and demeanor here resemble those of Woody Harrelson, and his performance combines comic timing with an un-macho sense of pathos missing from the rest of the film’s general sensibility. But Damsel reeks of an unearned smugness. I don’t know what era of filmmaking the Zellners are trying to capture with the film’s tone — the present; the newly popular American indie cinema of the ’90s; the revisionist Westerns of the late ’60s and ’70s; or some point during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Everything here is mashed together into a postmodern pileup that thinks it’s politically progressive and smart but really isn’t.

Even the way the Zellners play around with Pattinson’s Twilight-derived image as an alpha hunk is somewhat familiar at this point, since the actor has chosen a fairly adventurous path since becoming a star. Films as different as Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or, to pick a contemporary example, Indonesian director Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (which overtly riffs on Leone and Tarantino with a feminist bent) have offered genuinely subversive takes on the Western. Damsel feels more like an extended comedy sketch.

Damsel

R, 113 minutes

Opening Friday, July 6, at the Belcourt