The Last Son is a western that puts on airs of Greek tragedy, complete with self-fulfilling prophecies, incest, filicide, and parricide. It’s also divided into chapters, emulating the episodes in a Greek drama. And in lieu of a choir, we get a voiceover narration. Screenwriter Greg Johnson and director Tim Sutton know the words but not the music.
Of all the possible Greek tragic elements, the one this movie lacks the most, and without which the rest are worthless, is pathos. The characters fail to inspire empathy because they are never anything more than archetypes.
Heather Graham is a Whore with a Heart of Gold and a Sh*t for Brains (but then everyone here is more or less obtuse). Thomas Jane is a white man raised by Indians, which makes little difference because he doesn’t seem to care a lot about either affiliation. And Machine Gun Kelly looks and acts like the MTV grunge version of Oedipus. Et sic de ceteris. Every tree here is the wrong one to bark up.
It’s a shame that cinematographer David Gallego and editor Kate Abernathy did such a good job of endowing the film with the look of a legitimate western, only to have its beautiful visuals put in the service of a pretentious and spurious script.
(said visuals include a very effective use of natural locations in Montana, as well as a shot of a dying man whose last breath the cold renders visible, and which may or may not be a reference to a similar scene in Chimes at Midnight).
