Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis star in a horse opera set in a snowbound world of bars, brothels and wide open spaces
Here is a western starring Peter Dinklage, but forget hot sun-baked gullies and leather-skinned cowboys riding sweatily through rattlesnake country. The Thicket takes place in a hard, snowbound wilderness interspersed with equally hard, snowbound little townships consisting mainly of bars and brothels. You can see the breath in the air and the blood on the snow. The plot is staple horse opera: a kidnapped maiden must be rescued by a motley group of good-ish guys with mixed motives, headed up by Dinklage playing a bounty hunter character offering a similar vein of dry, world-weary cynicism as his breakthrough role as Tyrion in Game of Thrones, only much less aristocratic. He is joined by Gbenga Akinnagbe as his right hand man, with whom Dinklage has nice chemistry, and Levon Hawke, as a naive young Christian whose sister has been kidnapped by ruffians.
The ruffians are where the film really does something unusual, via a simple but intriguing gambit. In the book on which The Thicket is based, the main villain, a man, is called Cut Throat Bill. Here, Cut Throat Bill is played by Juliette Lewis. It isn’t exactly a case of trendy, gender-blind casting; while the character is still called Cut Throat Bill, and assumed by those who haven’t met him to be a man, as soon as Lewis encounters anyone, it is very clear that the character is perceived as female. “He’s a she,” and so on. Cut Throat Bill doesn’t correct them, but continues to go by that name. You might read the character as genderfluid or trans, but existing in a world that didn’t have any vocabulary for this, and the film makes no attempt to retrofit modern ideas on to a historical setting. Cut Throat Bill is Cut Throat Bill.
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