Brimstone: EW review
Brimstone is an unpleasant movie, but that’s not disqualifying. There are so many pleasant movies. It gets a bit boring, after awhile. And Brimstone doesn’t seem like it should be boring. Initially the tale of a mysterious mute housewife (Dakota Fanning) and the devilish preacher (Guy Pearce) who haunts her, the film takes a sharp turn from austere Crucible-y drama into horror-film grotesquerie and anti-western American mythology. Tongues are sliced off. Throats are slit. There are intestines. This is the kind of movie where, if you see a lamb or a human, odds are good you’ll soon also see their insides out.
Against all odds, Brimstone‘s a snooze. The self-importance doesn’t help. The story flows through four chapters, with titles signposting Biblical significance. Chapter 1 is “Revelation,” Chapter 2 “Exodus.” (Tragically, Chapter 3 is not “Deuteronomy.”) There’s a brothel called the “Inferno,” a town explicitly compared to Sodom & Gomorrah, a painting of Golgotha hung menacingly on a wall. We get it: This is serious stuff. Each Chapter tells a different tale of frontier amorality, with building pulpy weirdness untriumphant against the escalating pretentious philosophizing. Fanning’s housewife struggles to keep her family together. Elsewhere, we meet a young girl wandering the western wasteland. The girl’s played by a young actress named Emilia Jones, a genuine find who should have more to do in better movies soon.
Guy Pearce haunts the movie. Pearce gives good haunting: In films like Memento, The Proposition, and The Rover, he’s proven himself unusually adept at playing men with one foot in the grave. His menacing preacher is a sight to behold. He’s also a ridiculous character: The movie thinks his backstory is a slow-burn fascination, but every new revelation pushes him further into the realm of ridiculous. Fanning almost holds the movie together, her big eyes speaking desperate volumes. But Brimstone‘s narrative structure strands us outside of her character’s journey.
Director Martin Koolhoven made a name for himself with 2008’s Winter in Wartime, an acclaimed war film made in his native Netherlands. Clearly this new film took him a long time, and it badly wants to be an epic of sinful corrosion on the edge of the American Dream. Themes of incest and sexual assault run through the movie, but Brimstone is a bit of a goof, really. Wildly melodramatic moments of operatic violence are shot with flat-gritty modernism: It’s like someone thought A Fistful of Dollars could be Unforgiven. By the time Game of Thrones‘ Kit Harington shows up as the world’s cutest sad cowboy, the pastiche is complete. C
