Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson give intense performances in this brutal, ragged revenge Western, where the chase ultimately becomes a journey towards redemption, and in ways you probably won't see coming.
“Seraphim Falls” starts out as a revenge film, but we don’t know that right away. A man named Gideon (Pierce Bronson) who has been traveling through snow-covered mountains - the movie was filmed in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada - is shot while eating, with the shots coming from an unknown location from unseen assailants. But Gideon is an amazingly resourceful person; he manages to escape while wounded by tumbling out of sight and down a mountainside.
As the plot unfolds we learn just how keen his survival skills are, and how canny and illusive he can be. He also has incredible stamina and he’s very handy with a Bowie knife. When his attackers show up, they are one Colonel Carver (Liam Neeson), an ex-officer in the Confederate Army, and a posse of four mercenaries, who Carver has hired to help catch Gideon - and it must be alive. We see that Carver is ruthless in his pursuit of his prey. When they see blood in the snow, his hatred becomes obvious for the time: "Let him bleed," he says.
A further tease is offered a little later when both men have a dream about a burning house with figures running about the scene. The dream connects the two men, but we still don’t know the nature of the connection. But clearly there is a psychological issue between Gideon and Carver, an emotional remnant of a past that disturbs both. The corrosive memory is eating at each.
As the chase goes on, Gideon stays a few steps ahead of his pursuers and manages to pick off two of the mercenaries, and his killing style is savage. A third eventually quits because he is afraid of Gideon. The prey and those chasing him have various encounters on this journey. Gideon stumbles into a cabin owned by a settler and his two children; he’s forced to kill a young bandit who was going to kill him and takes his horse, and when when he later arrives at a Railroad camp he is seized because the horse has been stolen.
But he escapes one more time, with Carver and one remaining gunmen in hot pursuit. The avenge-minded Colonel and Hayes (Michael Wincott) stay overnight with some Mormons, who steal the bullets out of their guns. Carver comments to his companion, “There is no God out here.” He means in the wild, untamed, and desolate regions of the West, which is like an externalization of the chaos, hate, and desolation in the two protagonists, souls linked in a battle to the finish.
As the film approaches the last 20 minutes, there is a flashback to explain the burning house. At the very end of the Civil War, Gideon had led some union soldiers on to Carver’s farm, called Seraphim Falls, the Colonel’s family - his wife and two young boys - are accidentally killed in the conflagration. Gideon leaves, wracked by guilt, and Carver is consumed by hate and the need for revenge. This section seems so different than the rest of the film, which is pretty much a standard Western. I don’t want to give too much away about the final sequence but I would say this: Let’s assume “Seraphim Falls” is used not only as a name of a place and a corrosive memory, but also a spiritual reference for the two protagonists, Gideon and Carver, who have suffered through this arduous chase/journey, and are two, if you will, ‘fallen angels’ who are at the end of their tether.
By this time, with both of them exhausted by their mutual ordeal and ground down by their feverish emotion, they are ready for a surrender, characterized by forgiveness, reconciliation and redemption. Gideon is first to encounter two strange figures that seemed to materialize out of thin air at the edge of a great desert. I think it is best to understand them as ‘gatekeepers,’ just the kind of beings ‘fallen angels’ might encounter on this new plateau of self-realization. One is an Indian (Wes Studi) who behaves like the spirit of and owner of a waterhole, and he insists on an exchange of value with both men, like a gun for water, and gold for a horse. He spouts such puzzling wisdom as, “That which is yours will return to you, and that which you take will be taken from you.” The second ambiguous figure is a snake oil saleswoman (Angelica Huston) who is driving a wagon and dressed in a fancy red dress in the middle of this great emptiness; she also insists on an exchange. Carver, like Gideon, had to make a deal in order to pass by the two before he can continue his pursuit. He is now completely alone.
As the two enter the vast expanse of the white desert, I thought of T.E. Lawrence contemplating the crossing of the brutal expanse of desert that could lead him and his Arab fighters to Akaba and victory. The desert was nicknamed “God’s Anvil” and the same image would apply to what the two protagonists of “Seraphim Falls” have in front of them, as one gains on the other. When you see the end of the film keep this in mind: the chase was really a journey toward redemption.
For JERRY PFAFFL, writing about movies is an act of love and exaltation. Once a week while growing up he and his brother were taken to the neigborhood theater by thier parents to see second-run movies. He remembers sitting in the dark and being utterly mesmerized by noir thrillers, technicolor musicals, Westerns, and Biblical epics. When he was a college student he discovered the wonder of foreign movies and how more daring subject matter was possible. When he was teaching at UNLV he founded CINEMA X, a film society devoted to the showing of contemporary experimental films. When he was working at Bookmans on Ina he was in charge of the Video and DVD department and his nametag read "The Movie Guy." In sum, movies have always been his passion.
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