DAMSEL – Review

Robert Pattinson in DAMSEL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

In the weird Western indie comedy DAMSEL, Robert Pattinson plays Samuel Alabaster, a nattily dressed young man who walks out of the Pacific surf with a guitar, a gun and a miniature horse. He is headed for a seedy, strange Western town in search of a preacher (David Zellner), who he intends to take along to officiate at his wedding to his beloved at the end of a trek into the frontier wilderness.

DAMSEL does indeed have a damsel, played by Mia Wasikowska, but her distress mostly comes from the various men who have ideas of rescuing her from dangers they mostly create.

DAMSEL is the front runner for weirdest movie of the year, in this writer’s opinion. It seems to want to be a cross between Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN and THE PRINCESS BRIDE, where strange to nonsensical events take place in a landscape peopled with genre stereotypes, peppered by absurdities and occasional violence. The only person who seems really rational is the would-be damsel Penelope.

Directed and written by brothers David and Nathan Zellner (KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER), DAMSEL seems intended as a satiric comedy about stereotyping in Western movies. The idea of turning the damsel, who is usually little more than a plot device to motivate the male characters, into a real person, the central character with her own mind and plan, was not a bad one. It could have worked but the film is all over the place in tone and pacing and much of the attempted humor falls flat. The problem with DAMSEL is that it tries a little too hard, and can’t quite decide if it wants to actually say something about re-inventing one’s self and identity, like DEAD MAN, or just be a silly romp in a movie genre like THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

Mia Wasikowska gives a valiant try in her role as Penelope but she has a steep hill to climb. Pattinson goes all out on the weirdness for his romantic Western troubadour but mostly comes across as madman. David Zellner, as the drunken, confused preacher Parson Henry, spends a bit too much time dithering and chewing scenery. The preacher sometimes teeters on being the one to insert rational thought into the madness but every time an epiphany appears near, he retreats to stock repeated lines. Even the “damsel,” the one fighting to get out of the box men put her in, retreats to repeating phrases periodically.

Other Western characters abound, sometimes in a few scenes that look like to homage to other films, such as the menacing barroom bully (Morgan Lund), the mountain man hermit (Nathan Zellner) and the “noble Indian” (Native American actor Joseph Biligiere), who at least refrains from saying “stupid white man,” even if you can see him thinking it.

One of the pluses of DAMSEL are breath-taking location shots, in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park and on the Oregon coast, which adds an unexpected dimension of natural grandeur to the strange proceedings, with director of photography Adam Stone’s surprisingly lush images.

The mixed tone does not help DAMSEL. The film keeps the light silly tone of farce and parody even in grim suspenseful situations and moments of surprising violence, which should be funny but isn’t because of how graphic it is. The dialog sometimes suggests introspection on the characters’ part about their absurd predicaments but the moment quickly vanishes with a stereotype-based joke.

Some scenes have an absurdist comic spark, like the opening one with an old preacher (Robert Forster) and a young arrival in the West, sitting at a wooden “bus stop” in the middle of the desert waiting for the stagecoach, in a kind of Western “Waiting for Godot.” But any comedic promise is undermined by heavy handed dialog and just running on too long. Others create a sense of suspense, chaos and danger, but are then undermined by the director’s unwillingness to let the characters be present in the moment. Wasikowska’s Penelope often threatens the men with a shotgun but one with barrel so bent, it obviously would blow up in her hands if fired, a fact no one seems to notice. It’s supposed to be funny but that no one notices or comments just seems odd when they willingly comply with her instructions to do things that offer far more danger than the deformed gun. That joke is typical of the way DAMSEL keeps the audience from totally buying into these characters or what is happening, and we keep expecting to hear the director call “cut” at any moment and break for lunch.

The idea behind DAMSEL had some potential, the cast give it a brave try, and the production values are good. The problem is in the execution and in the rambling dialog, where the Zellner brothers needed to decide what kind of movie they were making. As is, DAMSEL is the lead contender for weirdest movie of the year, but maybe not quite with as much midnight show promise as others of that type.

If total weirdness with a Western flavor is what you are looking for, DAMSEL is it. DAMSEL opens Friday, July 6, at the Tivoli Theater.

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars