Directed by: David Mackenzie
Starring: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges
Rated R, 102 minutes
Donald Trump secured a presidential nomination by throwing a yearlong tantrum, violent clowns started emerging from forests across the nation, and now I’ve moved to Denver and started writing movie reviews again. Yes, it’s been a strange year for all of us. Take heart, though—the movie theater is still there, and in it are all the usual sequels, remakes, blockbusters, and franchises that, in this year of constant upheaval, are reassuring in their steadiness. For all movie buffs complain about formulaic Hollywood fare (something I’ve done plenty of), constancy is nice. It’s easy to escape to a place you already know.
Which is why a movie like “Hell or High Water” is both a great and unsettling movie for 2016. A Western with a distinctly modern moral compass, the movie follows brothers Tanner (Ben Foster, “3:10 to Yuma”) and Toby (Chris Pine, “Star Trek”) Howard as they rob branches of a Texas bank in order to pay off their debts and avoid the foreclosure of the family ranch. Sheriff Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges, “The Big Lebowski”) sets out in pursuit of the brothers, never quite connecting all the dots, but never losing their scent. As the stakes get bigger—bigger banks, bigger car chases, bigger guns—the brothers realize they’ve passed a point of no return, while Hamilton acknowledges that this case will be harder to solve and will take a harsher toll on him when all is said and done.
Much of this movie is rooted in the familiar, and even in cliches. Hamilton is on the brink of retirement, the “old pro working one last job” that we’ve all seen countless times. Bridges, in his performance, relies on the same gruff Southern mumbling that he employed to unintelligible effect in “True Grit,” although here with a little more bounciness. Meanwhile, Foster stands out as the quasi-manic hothead, while Pine, reserved and pensive, is the movie’s center, the mastermind who doubts he has the temperament for the job. If it rings a Godfather bell, it should.
The movie even looks familiar—gritty contemporary Western? Throw in plenty of wide shots of golden-hour farmland and a few establishing shots of motel and gas station parking lots, then do it all with organic shaky-cam effects, and you’ve got yourself a style. And the heavy-handed exposition toward the beginning, if awkward, certainly helps ground us in the setting and themes, so don’t expect too many plot twists. So little of this movie, at its core, is surprising—which gives all its little subversions that much more weight.
Consider, for instance, the Tea Party “Don’t Tread On Me” flag hanging in one of the brothers’ trailers. Or consider Hamilton’s half-Mexican, half–Native American colleague, the constant butt of Hamilton’s antiquated jokes, and whose rejection of those punch lines, both in demeanor and in speech, comments broadly on current American attitudes toward minorities. And compare him with the waitress who flirts with Toby right before a bank robbery, and her subsequent refusal to cooperate with the police because he left a big tip, which she needs to pay her bills. Throughout the film, the characters on the periphery of the main action serve as more than just local color. They are commentaries in and of themselves, frequently critical of figures of authority and power.
This dynamic makes “Hell or High Water” one of the few movies I’ve ever seen that manages to empathize with an extremely conservative population—you know, the sort that doesn’t typically show up around Harvard, Massachusetts—without resorting to maudlin caricatures and high tragedy. What becomes clear is that the characters here just want to feel like they are masters of their own lives, despite so many forces (in this case, financial) that tell them they aren’t.
The nice thing is that you can watch this movie because you just want to watch a slow-burning thriller-Western hybrid, or you can take it as a cultural commentary uniquely relevant to 2016. It’s entertaining and complex and malleable enough to work as both—which, in such a polarized year, is a rarity.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 10/21/16