Werner Herzog’s ‘Salt and Fire’ Starring Michael Shannon Is Flawed But Distinctive [TIFF Review]

During the 1970s heyday of the German New Wave, Werner Herzog’s earthy adventure films and dramas were hailed for their realism, as the director aimed to recreate onscreen the extreme conditions that his characters had endured. Herzog has also become one of the world’s most renowned documentary filmmakers by bending the rules of nonfiction and introducing obviously staged encounters and interviews in order to force the viewer to question what’s “true.” But over the past decade, a shift has been occurring in Herzog’s work. His docs have become more earnest and accessible, while his fiction features are now more stiff and artificial. The stiltedness is clearly an artistic choice, glaringly evident in the likes of “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” and “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” But is this a daring direction, or an act of self-sabotage?

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That question hangs over Herzog’s latest, “Salt and Fire,” an offbeat sociopolitical drama that may drive audiences to the exits in its first 15 minutes, with its laughably terrible dialogue and abrasively exaggerated performances. The film stars Veronica Ferres as Professor Laura Somerfeld, the leader of a United Nations task force sent to an unnamed country to file a report on an under-recognized ecological disaster dubbed “El Diablo Blanco.” Once the team arrives, they’re kidnapped by masked mercenaries and taken to the palatial estate of Matt Riley (Michael Shannon), a sensitive, philosophical capitalist whose company is responsible for the looming catastrophe. During the scenes that set all this up, Herzog has his cast either speak in a monotone or shout at high dudgeon while delivering exposition in the most generic way possible. How generic? Riley keeps referring to himself as “the CEO of the consortium” without ever giving his company a name, while Somerfeld talks about her “data” and her “delegation” as though these were abstract concepts.

The acting in this film is bad, and the writing’s ridiculous; and yet these aren’t bad actors, and Herzog (adapting a Tom Bissel short story) isn’t typically a clumsy writer. So what gives? What appears to be Herzog’s intention is to jolt the viewer into paying attention to the content of the film, rather than allowing us to get lost in the story. That’s similar to what Riley does with Somerfeld. She arrives in his country intending to compile information and to file a report about about a single incident of corporate malfeasance. But he’d rather she adopt a wider perspective, to see that the despoiling of the Earth isn’t something that can be reduced to numbers in a PowerPoint presentation. Herzog seems to be playing the same game, urging us to step back from the fine details of a single “heroes and villains” narrative and to see a bigger picture.

Or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s just at a phase in his career where he prefers dissonance. That’s certainly Herzog’s right as an artist responsible for so many masterworks. Whatever the rationale for this film’s clunkiness might be doesn’t completely ruin what turns out to be a surprising and occasionally beautiful film. Once this picture’s strange rhythms settle a bit, Herzog is able to work in a little comic relief —mostly courtesy of a smooth-talking, wheelchair-bound cynic named Krauss (Lawrence Krauss)— and to indulge in some digressive monologues from Riley about trompe-l’oeil paintings and deadly volcanoes. The movie then takes a fascinating turn when Somerfeld is abandoned in a rapidly expanding salt flat with two nearly blind children is and forced to survive for a week with minimal supplies.

A lot about “Salt and Fire” seems almost designed to provoke eye-rolls, right down to Herzog’s strange antipathy for statistics and “scientific instruments” as a way of mapping our environmental doom. But his imagery of the salt flats is haunting, and the conversations between Riley and Somefeld are genuinely enlightening, however clumsily the lines within them are spoken. Perhaps the best that can be said of “Salt and Fire” is that its flaws are wholly Herzog’s. Those flaws are deep. But so is the man responsible for them. [C+]

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