Eva Green doesnt say one word in this excellent western.
Eva Green doesn't say one word in this excellent western. Zentropa Entertainments

One of the consequences of my enthusiasm for the big green eyes and raw screen presence of the French-born actress Eva Green is that I failed in my piece about the new western The Salvation, which opens today and stars Green, to mention that its core is something like a trinity that forms the heart of darkness of the American capitalism we have today. Directed by Kristian Levring, a Danish filmmaker who used to follow the puritanical (indeed priestly) principles of the Dogme 95 movement, and shot in South Africa (its dry and mountainous Highveld region doubled, and not without desirable surreal results, for a post-Civil War frontier town), The Salvation unambiguously concentrates all that is now found to be rotten in American capitalism in its vilain Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan): militarism, oil corporations, and banks.

That trinity is the prison from which our democracy cannot escape. Even as the exceptional size of the military budget pushes the state deeper into debt, as the climate changes and warms, as the homes of millions are foreclosed, the big three maintain a grip on power that only seems to strengthen. Delarue, the villain who has a thing for purple jackets and the body of Eva Green (she plays the widow of his dead brother), is a former soldier who, while running a gang of former soldiers, buys property from hardworking settlers for a song and sells the deeds to an investor who sees the future of American energy in the black stuff that's so plentiful, its ugly bubbling pools are found all over the place. The film ends with an epic showdown at noon.