You wouldn’t believe what a difficult time I had seeing this
movie. Aside from the fact that the limited release didn’t hit my area for a
few weeks, my matinee showing had a problem with the audio, leading me to come
back later in the evening. But despite the difficulty in actually getting to Hell or High Water, the experience was
all worth it; it’s a first-rate flick, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it up
for a few golden statues come early 2017.Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers forced onto the wrong side of the law. In order to save their family’s ranch after the death of their mother, the two have resorted to bank robbery, meticulously planned and carefully precise. Their robbery spree attracts the attention of a retiring Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) and his partner (Gil Birmingham), who aim to stop the robberies – or at least understand why they’re happening.
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of westerns, perhaps just because I haven’t seen the right ones, but I’m a big fan of this genre-in-progress, the neo-western, which takes the themes of the western and relocates them into more contemporary trappings in order to continue to ask questions about justice, frontier spaces, and the nation’s long, complicated, and often troubling history. At the same time, it’s also (I think, indirectly) a space where older performers can step back into the genre and reevaluate it and themselves, where audiences can read the frontier’s weariness on the crags of an actor’s face.
You might think that I could very well be describing No Country For Old Men, and you’d be onto something, because Hell or High Water is very much of a piece with No Country. Both neo-westerns take questions of frontier justice into pressing issues of the twenty-first century (there, the loss of the “good old days”; here, the question of economic injustice). Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones are characters who ought to join each other on rocking chairs on the porch of their retirement, wearied as they are by the cases that baffle them. And while there’s no figure of pure evil like Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in Hell or High Water, there is the same lingering attention to the prairie wastelands of Texas, highlighting the bleak despair of the soul and the relentless persistence of our protagonists, who have only their own codes to which they can cling.
It’s truly riveting stuff, a two-hour trip that flies by despite its fairly small scope and tight narrative focus. The key is the well-crafted screenplay, as precise as the bank heists and wisely funny in a way that the trailers didn’t let on. Pine is surprisingly subdued, given his recent turn as the swaggeringly confident Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Of course, a Jeff Bridges performance is always worth the price of admission, with Hell or High Water somewhere between True Grit and Crazy Heart on the Dude-ometer. His turn as the retiring ranger practically prickles, and it’s the knowing gleam in Bridges’s eye that humanizes the character as we and his partner question why he’s pursing the case so doggedly.
Who knew it would take me through hell and high water just to see Hell or High Water? It’s worth the watch if you can find it, and it’s worth a double feature with No Country For Old Men to really think about where the neo-western is going.
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