John Maclean
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
There is little of the self-absorbed homage we got from Django Unchained or Once Upon a Time in the West.
It may be unfair to want Maclean's film to adhere to the cinematic convention of interpreting life in the American frontier as phantasmagoria, but Slow West's aesthetics lack even for the moral exultations that Quentin Tarantino's cartoonish exaggerations in Django Unchained ultimately make room for.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominik
influenced Slow West (2015)
Visuals
Evoking a more bare-bones variation of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’s style, Slow West moves through picturesque desert plains and forests with an ominous patience that often tips the material into absurdist comedy.
More recently, Australian rocker Nick Cave has done some of his very best work writing and co-scoring The Proposition (2005) and even having a cameo as a storytelling saloon singer in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), on which he collaborated once again with long-term musical compadre Warren Ellis.
It may not flaunt the unearned sense of self-seriousness of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , but as it builds toward its climax, of bodies rising and falling in synchronicity to the dance of bullets overhead, and of blood perfectly splattering across walls, it still only suggests a pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.
Lanthimos and the great DP Robbie Ryan ( American Honey , Slow West ) conceive a claustrophobic, candle-lit look for The Favourite that evokes Russian Ark and Barry Lyndon if either had been occasionally shot through a fisheye lens.
There’s also the problem of hiring Robbie Ryan – of such gorgeously lensed films as The Favourite, American Honey, and Slow West – as your DP and not utilising his clear, industry-leading skill.
Furthermore, its influences are far-ranging, with The Night of the Hunter an antecedent, along with the askew comedy of the Coens and John Michael McDonagh ( Calvary , The Guard ), while recent cross-generational bromances Mud and Joe are as apparently influential as western quests like The Searchers and True Grit .