Dead Souls

“Dead Souls” begins with the conspicuously named Strindler showing up in a border Arizona town in 1890 and offering to pay any and all well-heeled citizens handsomely to provide him with the names and birthdates of any Mexican laborers that might have died in their fields or on their lands. It’s a scheme similar to the one employed in Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel of the same name, a book on which the 71-year-old moviemaking maverick Alex Cox based his adaptation, conveying the eternal nature of such a plot as implicitly as Cox deploying an unexpected flash-forward does explicitly. When we first see Strindler, he does not so much appear as seem to materialize in the rugged southwestern landscape, less a person than some sort of mythological figure. If such figures exist to help us make sense of our worlds, then Strindler is here in part to help us make sense of ours, opening a cosmic line between the original Gilded Age and the second one that we are all enduring right now.

In addition to directing and co-adapting the script, Cox also plays Strindler, an appropriate DIY touch given that his longtime ostracization from Hollywood necessitated Kickstart funding to even get “Dead Souls” made in the first place. If it was, in fact, merely practical, it is also perfect, and not just because this might be shaping up as a swan song to the medium. His impassive air fits just right for the part of an unknowable person, one who alternately claims to be with the government, a census taker, and a priest. There is a wooden, even amateurish air to many of the actors surrounding him, which might also stem from budgetary constraints. That means they sometimes sell the quite funny deadpan dialogue short, but it also works in the same way that some of the obvious artificial mustaches and muttonchops work. The unnamed border town of “Dead Souls” is not literally fake in the way of the replica town in “Blazing Saddles,” but in the idea that Cox ultimately gets across, it might as well be.

For all the talk of Mexican laborers, none are seen, because all are dead, their names and faces less a conduit to their identities than a means to an end. Strindler’s phony rolodex of identities, meanwhile, echoes the various townsfolk he encounters, all of whom might be who they say they are but in their dealings with this stranger many reveal themselves to be two-faced and no less eager to profit off the emergent scheme. No one seems to be an upstanding member of the community save for the also conspicuously named Boracho (Zander Schloss), the wagon master ferrying Strindler from place to place, and who inadvertently winds up taking a bullet for his nefarious client. Indeed, Strindler, who cannot ride a horse nor shoot a gun, keeps walking between the raindrops, a variation on the old holy fool archetype, and putting me in mind of John McCabe of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” That landmark western utilized the holy fool to ultimately make an argument for strength in community over individualistic capitalist pursuit whereas in “Dead Souls,” Cox elevates the selfish American swindler to the status of myth.