Silent Tongue

Sam Shepard – 1993 – USA

Moody and surreal western that is mainly only sought out these days for being one of the final films of the late River Phoenix.  It received meager promotion at the time; its muted tone of madness and the supernatural was likely confusing to distributors, being quite different than prestigious westerns of the time like Dances with Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992).  There are no heroics in the story; nor are there any standard western themes about outlaws and frontier life.  The Old West of Silent Tongue is a murky world in which white and Indian societies seem to have bled into each other; a mating that results in a kind of inbreeding effect rather than distilling the best of both worlds.  Phoenix plays a crazed, half-feral farmer lamenting the death of his Native American wife, who was purchased for him by his father (Richard Harris) from a traveling showman (Alan Bates).  Thinking that the dead woman’s sister is the only thing that might rescue his son’s sanity, the father kidnaps her.  The showman, objecting on the grounds that his surviving daughter is too valuable (monetarily) to lose, sets out in pursuit, accompanied by his half-breed son (Dermot Mulroney).  There are no populace scenes in the film, and the silence and isolation in the vast landscape is shown to have a disengaging effect on the human mind, turning individuals into barely verbal animals incapable of peace in life or in death.