There's a lot to discuss regarding Far From Men, a historical adventure film adapted from a story by Albert Camus, but before getting to any of that, let's take a second to sing the praises of Viggo Mortensen. After the Lord of the Rings trilogy made him a superstar, he could have easily sold out and refocused his career solely on would-be blockbusters. He could have signed on to any one of the dozens of superhero films DC and Marvel have coming out over the next decade, which are sucking up every halfway-respected actor in the business in order to shore up their respectability. At bare minimum, he could have followed the lead of every aging male actor looking to prove his virility by getting his own knockoff version of Taken (even a 54-year-old Sean Penn wasn't above playing a frequently shirtless assassin in The Gunman). Instead, his post-Aragorn filmography has been filled with collaborations with David Cronenberg and challenging art-house pictures that nobody ever thought would make a dent at the box office. Far From Men proves yet again what a nuanced, compelling actor he is, and the courage and quiet decency of his character make his contemporaries' action movies look like little more than macho playacting.
Mortensen plays Daru, a soldier-turned-schoolteacher living in 1954 Algeria. The country's War of Independence is raging around him, but he refuses to take a side -- although he nominally supports the Algerian rebels in their fight to drive off the French colonialists and reclaim their country as their own, he insists he's had his fill of violence.
That resolve is tested when he's ordered to transport a prisoner, an Algerian farmer named Mohamed (Reda Kateb) who's accused of killing his cousin, to the French authorities for execution. Daru doesn't want to do it, but it turns out that other people are hunting for Mohamed as well, so staying holed up in his home isn't an option either. The two men set off on their journey together, and it's soon revealed that Mohamed has his own reasons for going along: He wants to be killed by the French in order to prevent a blood feud between the two sides of his family.
Once it becomes clear that Daru is an open-minded humanist and Mohamed is a gentle soul whose act of murder was completely justified, it's obvious what direction this story line is heading in: The prisoner and captor become travelling companions and then friends, and there's a fair amount of male bonding along the way -- they even make a trip to the whorehouse of Daru's youth, so Mohamed can lose his virginity before he dies. It's well-acted but a little rote, hitting all of the beats you'd expect (maybe the most intriguing thing about their bond is that Daru is Christian while Mohamed is a Muslim, yet religion is never presented as an obstacle to their friendship).
Far more interesting is the way the two men keep getting dragged into the war, spending time with both sides during their journey. A number of the Algerian rebels served with Daru in an earlier conflict and consider him a friend, but they take him "hostage" when they're pinned down by colonial forces, assuming that the French see him as one of their own. But the French consider him an outsider as well, since his parents were Spanish settlers in the region (while Mortensen has ambiguous European features and a tremendous gift for languages, passing him off as a Spaniard is pushing it). The journey ultimately leads Daru to the realization that he has lived in two worlds without committing to either one, and in doing so he belongs to neither.
In addition to being a fine character study, Far From Men does a tremendous job of exploring the alien beauty of the Algerian desert. Director David Oelhoffen and cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines keep returning to wide shots of the landscape as the characters try to make their way through it, a motif that drives home how lost and disconnected Daru and Mohamed feel. While it looks like an adventure film on the surface, Far From Men is really a portrait of loneliness and isolation, one that offers no easy answers as to how these two men can survive without compromising their principles. Let Hollywood's lesser actors waste their time playing men who are quick to violence; Viggo Mortensen is able to give us a pacifist who's tougher and more interesting than any superhero or CIA operative.