Hell or High Water

Hell or High Water (2016) is a sentimental Western.  Westerns are not about actual history, but, instead, memory.  Memory recalls the past as either legendary or mythical.  Legends are sentimental -- hence, the films of John Ford; myths are savage exercises in remorseless destiny -- that is, the some of the films of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah.  The greatest Western directors alternate between the sentimental and the savage or, indeed, sometimes, embody both approaches to memory in one and the same film -- both Peckinpah and Ford had the gift of combining the two approaches in a single work of art.  (The director of this film, David Mackenzie, inclines toward the sentimental -- I thought his film Mud with Matthew McConnaughy was close to unwatchable as a result of its goopy sentiment.) 

Although Hell or High Water is set in modern-day west Texas, the scenario ticks off the standard features of the form -- there are chases across barren land (here with vehicles not horses), two rough-hewn brothers sometimes at odds with one another and sometimes allied; the film features a grizzled law man and his Indian side-kick pursuing the malefactors.  Jeff Bridges plays this part of the Texas ranger, a role that seems designed for Ben Johnson (in the Ford mode) or Warren Oates (in the minor key).  There are shootouts in badlands, a cattle drive, trips to the saloon staffed with predatory prostitutes and card players (here an Oklahoma casino), and the film's plot revolves around a villainous bank's conspiracy to rob the two protagonists of their inheritance, the hardscrabble ranch on which the brothers' mother has just died -- a nasty tract of land sitting atop a profitable oil field.  The movie is most satisfying as entertainment, well-written with lots of gruff and curmudgeonly repartee, and the vistas of west Texas (actually New Mexico) are gorgeous.  The film proceeds in a 2nd Amendment Popularist mode:  everyone is armed and there are big gun battles involving the two brothers and just about everyone in Texas who licensed and "conceal and carry" and the engine for the plot is the brothers' unconventional fundraising -- they need to rob enough branches of the Midlands Texas bank to finance the pay-off of property taxes and a reverse mortgage accrued on the widow's ranch.  The Popularist impulse demonstrated by the film is its Robin Hood sensibility -- the two bandit brothers give 200 dollar tips to fat waitresses and intend to pay off the nefarious bank with its own money.  (Of course, the plot has holes in it big enough to drive cattle herd through -- it's not clear why the two brothers who have now inherited the bank don't just refinance themselves since the property is now posited to be fantastically valuable and, of course, would certainly be interesting to lenders as collateral for a loan from a bank in Houston or Fort Worth.) 

Hell or High Water has good acting, although Jeff Bridges sometimes overdoes the grizzled law man stuff -- he mutters his dialogue in a rumbling voice midway between a bull's bellow and an earthquake and I couldn't understand half of what he said.  The Texas Ranger spends a lot of time taunting his Indian sidekick with racial slurs -- I suppose this is supposed to be funny but it just comes off as bullying.  The Indian is a dignified gent and, of course, turns out to be cannon fodder in the shootout at the end of the movie.  When Bridges accuses the Indian of heathen rites and he responds that he's a Catholic, there's a sense of gratuitous meanness in the film -- these guys have been working together for years and Bridges doesn't know this about his compadre or worse just doesn't care.  The tough but heart-of-gold brothers are a little annoying and their byplay is predictable -- the crazy brother has shot their father to death for beating their mother and is dangerously violent; the good brother, played by Chris Pine, tries to be responsible and, even, a good father.  (There's a nice moment in the final shoot-out when the crazy brother atop a pile of flaking gravel surveys the vast landscape pointing his long gun and proclaiming that he is "lord of the plains.")  As in all Westerns, there's too much gun-worship -- a scene in which the crazy brother backs off a posse of vigilantes by spraying them with machine gun fire is not as entertaining as it should be in light of the very real massacre in Las Vegas.  The film ends with a fine, gruff verbal stand-off between Bridges' character and the surviving brother -- it's a tense and suspensefully scripted scene that redeems some of the nonsense preceding it.  The movie is derivative but this is to be expected in a genre film -- the picture that the movie most resembles, oddly enough, is Spielberg's Sugarland Express, a picture about mismatched partners in crime fleeing across the vast landscape of Texas in pursuit of an equally quixotic, and sentimental objective:  of course, that film profited immensely by Ben Johnson playing the part of the relentless Texas Ranger -- in other words, the Ben Johnson part was played by Ben Johnson himself.  The best scene in this picture is a short one -- the protagonists encounter a prairie fire and a herd of spooked cattle that some cowboys are driving toward a river to escape the flames.  It's wholly gratuitous, mysterious, and very beautiful.