Producers: Peter Dinklage, David Ginsberg, Caddy Vanasirikul, Brian O’Shea, Elliott Lester, Shannon Gaulding, Chad Oakes, Michael Frislev, Andre L III and Gianni Nunnari Director: Elliott Lester Screenplay: Chris Kelley Cast: Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Esme Creed-Miles, Levon Hawke, Leslie Grace, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Macon Blair, Arliss Howard, James Hetfield, Ned Dennehy, David Midthunder, Andrew Schulz, Ryan Robbins, Guy Sprung, Derek Gilroy and Teach Grant Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Grade: B
The moodiness is so thick you could cut it with a knife in Elliott Lester’s adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s 2013 novel. Scripted by newcomer Chris Kelley, “The Thicket” is set at the cusp of the twentieth century, in a desolate, wintry American West where technology is just starting to intrude—a motorcycle appears in the opening scene—and the old way of life is crumbling.
Yet the story, which basically comes down to the pursuit of a gang of cutthroat outlaws by a bounty hunter and the man who’s hired him, is a traditional one. But it comes with some unexpected twists. The bounty hunter, Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage), is a dwarf. The gang leader, Cut Throat Bill, is a woman (Juliette Lewis). And they’re joined by a sense of resentment against the world as objects of ridicule—Jones for his size, Bill for her heavily scarred face, the result of a brutal childhood narrated late in the film by a preacher (Ned Dennehy) whose church she’s burned down.
Jones is hired by callow young Jack Parker to track down Bill, who’s abducted his sister Lula (Esme Creed-Miles) after killing their grandfather Caleb (Guy Sprung) in an altercation over a ferry boat ride. (The siblings had just lost both their parents to smallpox.) Jones and his partner Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe) are themselves being pursued by brothers Simon and Malachi Deasy (James Hetfield and Macon Blair); they’ve been deputized by Bailey Mayfield (Ryan Roberts), a town grandee who’d been humiliated by Jones after Mayfield had not only tried to shortchange him on a grave-digging job but then disparaged him as a man.
Jones reluctantly accepts Jack’s offer after being promised a plot of land the Parkers are scheduled to inherit, and so the three men set out in pursuit of Bill and her remaining gang members (Arliss Howard, David Midthunder, Derek Gilroy and Teach Grant), who are headed for the Thicket, a heavily-forested region that the snows will cut off from the rest of the world until the spring thaw. The unofficial posse will gradually get two new members: Jimmy Sue (Leslie Grace), a prostitute Jack rescues from her cruel boss (Andrew Schultz), and Malachi Deasy, after Bill has killed his brother. All will be settled at a cabin in the Thicket where the bodies pile up.
Dinklage and Lewis are both in fine form, he putting his gruff act to excellent use as he mans a rifle with a telescopic attachment that he inherited from Annie Oakley, with whom he once worked the circuit, and she playing the snarling, pitiless villain to perfection, cutting down one hapless victim after another. (She’s also the motorcyclist in that initial scene, stopping long enough to interrupt a funeral and order the casket opened so that she can steal the corpse’s warm coat, as well as a horse.) The rest are all fine, but even the most flamboyant of them pale in contrast to the stars, who, thankfully, share one scene at a table in a saloon, commiserating over their mistreatment by the world.
The film benefits from the authentically frigid Canadian locations, beautifully caught by cinematographer Guillermo Garza in painterly widescreen images. The production design (Justin Ludwig), art direction (Edward Smith Taylor), set decoration (Tara Bartlette) and costumes (Ann Maskrey) all contribute to a compelling sense of place and time. Lester’s approach is very deliberate, with even the action sequences taking their time to unfold, and Jean-Christophe Bouzy’s editing contributes to the unhurried, meditative feel. So does Ray Suen’s understatedly mournful score, which gives way in the bittersweet coda to a Schubert piano piece. That final sequence is a callback to the observation from Emily Dickinson that opens the film about home—something that most of the characters in “The Thicket,” even those most damaged, are striving to find for themselves.
This was obviously a passion project for Dinklage, who also serves as one of the producers, and although it’s not without some flaws of pacing, he’s done it proud. This handsomely mounted, slow-burning Western has a plot that’s essentially a genre commonplace, but it adds enough unusual elements to give it real distinction.