Seraphim Falls

Directed by David Von Ancken

Children who enjoyed last year’s The Proposition, that ghoulish Australian “western” written by Nick Cave, didn’t really love westerns. They were in love with darkness—a fascination with cynicism and horror that adolescents routinely mistake for life’s truth. They probably won’t like Seraphim Falls, which also essays the western, starting out with the requisite ugliness of a deadly, seemingly unfair and unmotivated manhunt. But Seraphim Falls actually takes viewers through the heart of mankind’s darkness—revenge—yet seeks the light.

Director/writer David Von Ancken has obviously chosen the western for his feature film debut because he seeks the genre’s classicism as a means of illuminating man’s earthly turmoil. Instead of turning the form upside down through some misguided notion that it needs to be subverted, Von Ancken echoes the heritage of American history as expressed through the mythology of the western. Serpahim Falls is foremost a movie about men in crisis, set in the past in order to distill its themes of survival and morality.

Pierce Brosnan plays Gideon, a man eluding a posse headed by Carver (Liam Neeson). They are introduced in the midst of their personal battle. As the story of these men’s antagonism moves from a wintry forest to a hot desert, Von Ancken highlights nature and familiar western types: outlaws, settlers, religious migrants, an Indian (Wes Studi) and one shady lady (Anjelica Huston). In the opening chase sequence, Gideon is wounded then eludes Carver’s gang but slips into a river that carries him down rapids into a waterfall. This literalizes Von Ancken’s subject: man’s fall from grace (as suggested by the film’s poetic title). Each episode, contrasting Gideon’s survival with Carver’s pursuit, shifts from realism to myth as if Von Ancken is looking beyond the story’s surface to find its historical and spiritual truth.

Seraphim Falls is as self-conscious as The Proposition but Von Ancken never opts for simple bleakness. He doesn’t condescend to the genre like Nick Cave but engages its atmosphere, psychology and morality in every moment and every action.

Neeson’s Carver warns his henchmen: “If you kill this son of a bitch, it will not be paid. Extremities only!” Through this gruesome specificity, Von Ancken presents man’s brutality point blank. At times, Seraphim Falls is as bloody as a Mel Gibson movie (the film is produced by Gibson’s production company Icon), but this also evokes Sam Peckinpah’s bloody pragmatism—a knowledge of man’s lethal potential that recalls the harsh vision of Peckinpah’s masterpiece Straw Dogs.

Von Ancken applies this vision to both Brosnan and Neeson’s predicament. As veterans of the recent Civil War, they have witnessed or participated in atrocities that they can never overcome. Their relentless struggle with cruelty is also a moral struggle. As their fight goes from the wilderness and into civilization, Von Ancken raises biblical parallels. “He sees your sin!” chides a wagon train of Mormons. “Ain’t no God out here,” Carver replies.

Seraphim Falls uses the western more intelligently than Clint Eastwood exploits the war movie in his dour diptych Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Instead of a facile modern-day allegory, Von Ancken addresses the timelessness of man’s inhumanity. Brosnan and Neeson ruggedly convey the suffering inherent in a culture of violence (even lending echoes of historic Irish conflict). Whether obsessed with escape or the hunt, these men are caught up in notions of masculine pride and primitive, social aggression. They’re presented as equally strong, intelligent and resourceful. And although they are bound by the same dread Civil War history, their obsession makes them equally doomed. Yet Seraphim Falls never suggests that Von Ancken is content with man’s downfall or with genre degeneration. He seeks to understand and sympathize through genre practice. That’s what justifies Seraphim Falls as an Art-Western.