A MAGNIFICENT WESTERN
Two bank-robbing brothers run riot in Texas in one of the films of the year
Asuperb modern-day western, Hell Or High Water is in various ways evocative of the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men, and of a pair of classic films of the late sixties, George roy Hill’s butch Cassidy And The sundance Kid and Arthur penn’s bonnie And Clyde.
Yet it is also gloriously singular, and one of the best pictures I have seen all year.
It begins with two men robbing a small-town bank in west Texas. ‘Y’all are new to this, ahm guessing,’ says the cashier, and indeed they are.
They are a pair of brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris pine and ben Foster), who need to raise $43,000 by the end of the week, to stop the Texas Midland bank foreclosing on their late mother’s ranch.
They feel the bank has treated their family immorally, so they decide to return the compliment, paying it back with its own money. but their claim on the moral high ground is shaky. Tanner is just out of prison, and treats the hold-ups more as a huge adrenaline shot than a mission to right a wrong.
Meanwhile, as they move their two-man heist operation from town to town, a pair of Texas rangers are on their tail, trying to anticipate where they might strike next.
The older of the lawmen is Marcus Hamilton (Jeff bridges), a widower who is about to retire and desperately wants to crack one last case before he turns in his badge.
Grizzled and world-weary, he is not above baiting his Native American partner Alberto parker (Gil birmingham) with racist jibes, but their relationship is built on affectionate mutual respect.
bridges, who spends the film appearing to chew the cud like a Longhorn steer, gives one of the finest performances of his long career. Which is lofty praise indeed.
He is not the only class act, however. pine finds depths pretty well hidden in those all-action beefcake roles of his, and while Foster’s versatility is already evident from films such as The program, in which he played the cyclist Lance Armstrong, he is at the top of his game, too.
Teasing the best out of both his
cast and the Texas landscape is David Mackenzie, the Scotsman whose last film was 2013’s brutal, but brilliant, prison drama, Starred Up.
Here he shows that he is as adept at generating tension in wide-open spaces as in claustrophobic cells. Indeed, Hell Or High Water, at one level, is a kind of visual hymn to rural Texas.
THE camera lingers so lovingly on its vast expanses, its oil derricks, those interminable goods trains, that you’d swear the director hailed from nearer Dallas than Dundee.
Mackenzie, and his screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (whose impressive cv also includes last year’s splendid thriller Sicario), have pulled off something really clever here, a film with two sets of protagonists, both tugging equally on audience loyalties. even more cleverly, those loyalties keep being tested.
Toby seems about as decent as a bank-robber can be, but he has been a poor father and husband, making this an exercise in redemption, although that, too, is undermined when one of the heists goes fatally wrong.
Moreover, although it is a deadly serious film, gritty and nasty when it needs to be, there is an undercurrent of humour best exemplified by a priceless exchange with a crotchety old waitress when the rangers sit down to eat in a small-town diner.
She is played by Margaret Bowman, who played an equally crotchety motel manager in No country For Old Men, so maybe this is Mackenzie’s little nod of homage to the coen brothers. If so, they should be flattered. He is a fine filmmaker.
THERE are some great comic flourishes too in captain Fantastic, but the first thing you should know about it is that it’s not a superhero film. Not in the usual sense, anyway, although Ben cash (a memorably charismatic performance by viggo Mortensen) certainly thinks of himself as different from most ordinary mortals. Deep in the woods in America’s North-West, his wife absent with an initially undisclosed sickness, he is raising his six children to fend for themselves in the wild. So they can trap, kill and gut animals, but they can also speak five languages, and know the works of Austen and Dostoevsky. Ben wants his children to fish and hunt, but also think for themselves. He encourages intellectual debate. He won’t tolerate the word ‘ interesting’ because he thinks it’s a copout. Why is something interesting? explain. elucidate. Think. So, is Ben a paragon of fatherhood, or the deluded selfstyled leader of a mini-cult? This is the film’s central question, around which all the drama swirls. It takes a while for the answer to crystallise,crystallise especially as Ben seems such a noble idealist, who believes that Americans are ‘under-educated and overmedicated’ and is determined that his children should not be absorbed into a society he despises.
Then they all set off on a road trip to a family funeral, and the children are exposed to everything their father has tried so hard to insulate them from.
That’s when the cracks in his patriarchy begin to show. He subjects his staid in-laws to his pieties, declining to respect their values in the iron- clad belief that his are superior.
In an extreme way, captain Fantastic packs a message for anyone who chooses homeschooling over conventional education, by implying that children need exposure to the real world, not protection from it.
But there are arguments on both sides, and this film explores them, always entertainingly, never tendentiously, often movingly.
Yes, it is overwritten and unsubtle in parts, but I enjoyed it enormously, and squirrel-fur hats off to writer-director Matt ross, for giving us a story that is, dare I say, so interesting.