Hell or High Water (2016)
Neo-Western by David McKenzie, written by Taylor Sheridan, whose name has practically become synonymous with the genre.
Hell or High Water is the story of two brother played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster robbing banks to secure the future of their family and two rangers played by Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham going after them. It distills the the essence of the western down to its bare basics, those breaking the law and those upholding it. Very cleverly using post recession America at its backdrop, where faith in the institutions, the government, the bank, law enforcement was starting to dissolve and desperation started to overtake the desire to not rock the boat.
Pine plays a divorced labourer, Foster an ex-con. Both are aware that their crime spree is probably going to be the end of them, doing it not to benefit themselves but to benefit their families. Bridges and Birmingham are just doing their job, trying to protect innocents from getting in harms way. Hell or High Water makes it clear that neither of those are in the wrong, strictly speaking, but also that neither of them are upholding any noble principles. Both are doing what they're doing because they concede that it's a violent world we're living in and that the application of violence is the only way to survive.
Not to overthink any of it, though, Hell or High Water is at its core a fairly simple narrative. It doesn't quite manage to, or even attempt to, elevate its stories and its character from archetypal to iconic the way something like No Country for Old Men clearly wants to. It's a story about very essential ideas, not of very essential ideas. Which means despite never quite reaching for something transcendent, it never really stumbles. It's a fairly grounded story with realistic characters, realistic motivations and set pieces that play out in fairly realistic ways. It is, by any definition an action movie, but what it has in terms of shootouts, explosions and standoffs all plays out in a way that takes human life seriously. Every death has a sense of impact. Every scene plays out believably without ever becoming completely predictable.
All of which makes HoHW a very appreciable movie. There is a certain restraint to the way it refuses to exaggerate its action or its drama for the sake of establishing a sense of scale or meaning the material doesn't warrant. There is very little pretention to it. There are, which I will say, a couple of moments where the dialogue felt to me like it was trying a bit too hard and exchanges came close to gratuitous tarantinoing. It's not that those exchanges weren't witty, which certainly puts the above those in many other recent movies, but you could also tell that they were written by a writer trying to be witty. Much like I wasn't that hot on many of the needle drops in the earlier half of the movie that seemed to have gone through a grab bag of not terribly memorable country music. I did enjoy the original score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, though.
I think Hell or High Water is a very effective movie that has some larger ideas riding on the backseat, but never lets them interfere with the rather simple and personal story playing out at the front. A simple and personal story that's effectively directed and very well acted. Jeff Bridges as the cranky old ranger is probably the standout but honestly, I genuinely feel Chris Pine should be given more credit. Of all the generic handsome blond guys to come out of the modern action movie scene, he's the one who embodies the whole dashing leading man with the most genuine humanity. He's probably more than half the reson the Wonder Woman movie are remotely watchable. I like the dash of Michael Mann in the staging of the shootouts and bank robbery.
It's a movie that is really quite good in a very modest and straight forward way. Human without too much sentimentality, witty without too much buffoonery and manly without too much machismo. It was the last movie I've been meaning to watch in my, inevitably reductive, little retrospective of the western genre throughout the years and I think I'm quite happy with it as a capstone.
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