David McKenzie (2016)
If you’re a movie lawman on the verge of retirement, it’s a safe bet that your last case will be the death of either you or your partner-in-solving-crime. If you get out of the case alive, it will haunt you for the rest of your days. In Hell or High Water (good title), Jeff Bridges plays grizzled Marcus Hamilton, a Texas Ranger approaching the end of his working life. Stetson-wearing Hamilton seems a good ol’ boy, though not in a pejorative sense. His sidekick is Alberto Parker, a man with Native American blood in his veins (Gil Birmingham, the actor who plays him, has Comanche ancestors). This is a modern Western crime thriller – with a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) and set in present-day Texas – so it’s also a pretty safe bet that Parker will be the law enforcer who doesn’t survive. His death in the line of duty functions as a kind of apology for the way Westerns used to characterise Native Americans.
Hamilton and Parker are trying to catch two bank robbers. They too are both a familiar pairing and predictably modernised. The robbers are brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard. Tanner (Ben Foster) is a bitter, loco ex-con, who served time for the killing of an abusive father. Although his marriage has broken up, Toby (Chris Pine) is a quiet, conscientious family man. He has turned to crime for a morally responsible purpose. The Howard boys’ mother recently died, leaving the family ranch in debt through a ‘reverse mortgage’ (aka home equity conversion mortgage). Oil has been discovered on the adjoining land. If the debt isn’t settled within a few days, the Midland Bank of Texas will foreclose on the property. In desperation, Toby determines to rob several branches of the Midland Bank to amass the cash needed to pay off the mortgage. Once that’s done, he’ll sell the oil rights so as to ensure for his own sons the comfortable life denied to him and Tanner – and, he eventually tells Marcus Hamilton, to earlier generations of the Howard family, who’ve lived with the ‘disease’ of poverty. After causing mayhem in the climactic bank robbery and killing Parker, Tanner – for whom there was no future – is shot dead by Hamilton. Forward-thinking Toby’s plan succeeds.
Hell or High Water is something more specific than a ‘neo-Western’. It’s a post-2008-recession Western: if there’s an out-and-out baddie in the story, it’s the bank. Taylor Sheridan’s dialogue also modifies expectations of Western laconicism. The main men, especially Hamilton, are increasingly talky, even if the actors, especially Chris Pine, are often inaudible. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have written a steeped-in-Western-myth score and some boring songs for the film but the most representative number on the soundtrack is the one played over the closing credits. This is by Chris Stapleton and turns out to be called ‘Outlaw State of Mind’ – I couldn’t make out the ‘outlaw’ as the song was being sung. The lyrics I could make out suggested something nearly as funny as ‘The Ballad of Wiener Dog’ though the maundering voice and melody ensured that ‘Outlaw State of Mind’ wasn’t as enjoyable[1]. The cinematographer Giles Nuttgens makes the large Texan landscapes more impressively melancholy.
There’s some overacting in Hell or High Water – I hardly dare say, given how revered he now is, that I thought some of this came from Jeff Bridges. Although David McKenzie’s movie presents a man’s world, the two performances I enjoyed most were cameos from women. The opening scene features Dale Dickey as a bank teller whose reward for getting to work early is being held up by the Howard brothers. Dickey, who was memorably scary in Winter’s Bone, has such a strong face that, even playing this hapless character, she looks as formidable as the two masked intruders. Near the end of the movie, the now retired Hamilton, still bugged that Toby Howard managed to escape justice, goes back to the office and has a conversation with the woman who’s replaced him (the replacement’s gender is clearly meant to be a comment in itself). Ranger Margaret, as she’s called in the cast list, is played by Heidi Sulzman: she looks and sounds convincingly ordinary and her diction is exemplary. On the other hand, there’s an incongruous (embarrassing) cameo from Margaret Bowman as a long-serving waitress in the ‘T-Bone Café’ – she seems to have gate-crashed from a Coen brothers movie. I went to see Hell or High Water because it’s been so very enthusiastically received – currently 98% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, from 175 reviews. It’s also a considerable box-office success. I admit to a blind spot for the virtues of Westerns and heist movies but I genuinely wish I could see why so many people think this film is seriously good.
22 September 2016
[1] A sample of the lyrics, available in full on YouTube:
‘I’ve seen the devil in a dark coal mine
I’ve been higher than a Georgia pine
And there’s people all across the land
From West Virginia to the Rio Grande
Hold on like I am all the time all the time
In an outlaw state of mind … ‘
