Review: Hell or High Water

Hell or High Water (15)

USA 2016 105 mins Dir: David Mackenzie Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham

The spirit of the old West courses through the spellbinding Hell or High Water, a quintessential tale of frontier justice in which the jingling spurs and thundering hooves of old have transmuted into a melancholy landscape strewn with highways, automobiles and corrupt banks. That Starred Up director David Mackenzie and Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan are able to both embrace and contravene our expectations of the film’s Texan landscape (actually shot in New Mexico) is one of the many reasons why we’re looking at one of the most ruggedly sinewy and gripping movies of 2016.

It’s also startlingly, genuinely funny, a sense of dry wit that will inevitably draw comparison to the sly No Country humour of the Coen brothers but also clearly owing to the crotchety banter of outlaw classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It becomes apparent right from the get-go as we see squabbling, bank-robbing siblings Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) storming a local branch only to be informed that they’ll have to wait for the manager to arrive with access to the safe. Throughout the movie successfully leavens its more tense, violent moments with such wonderful nuggets, crafting a deeply engrossing experience that also, remarkably, manages to feel consistent in its tone.

By ignoring the traceable bills and sequentially working their way around local banks, the brothers, mourning the death of their mother, hope to raise enough capital to pay off the reverse-mortgage on their family’s ranch, a place where they’ve also recently discovered a vein of money-making oil. It’s a crusade laced with equal parts pathos and revenge: as they look to punish the financial bureaucrats crumbling their lives, and lives of the other locals, into dust, the more compassionate and steady Toby has an ex-wife and sons whom he hopes will inherit the land. Meanwhile the recently-released-from-prison Tanner is the live-wire brought in by his brother and who realises he has a taste for this firecracker, Bonnie and Clyde lifestyle.

The final piece of the puzzle is Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton, Jeff Bridges finally getting a memorable character around which he can wrap his marble-gargling vocals. Also on his way out and on the verge of retirement, Hamilton recognises the brothers’ M.O. pretty swiftly and sets out in hot pursuit along with his Mexican/Native American/Catholic partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham), with whom he shares some of film’s saltiest and funniest banter. (“It’s the teasing you’ll miss most,” Hamilton says of his impending retirement.)

Yet even these little vignettes are laced with moments of richness and casual profundity. At one point tiring of his partner’s jibes, Parker sagely points out that the very landscape over which they’re treading once belonged to his ancestors, subsequently overrun by white settlers, and now infested with another parasitic presence in the form of the omnipresent banks. His words are weighted with the kind of lyrical, engrossing sadness of which author Larry McMurtry would be proud, a comparison heightened by the presence of Bridges returning to the arid, dust-bowl environment of The Last Picture Show. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ mournful score only serves to reinforce the sense of an entire era passing out of memory.

With screenwriter Sheridan building on the blend of topicality and pulpy suspense threaded through last year’s terrific Sicario, it’s surely Scottish director Mackenzie’s outsider’s eye that transforms the movie into a powerfully intuitive sense of drama. As a filmmaker he is always finding haunting ways to re-frame familiar situations, whether it’s a weather vane grinding to a halt behind a brotherly conversation pulsating with regret, or a witness to one of the robberies refusing to hand in her tip for evidence on the basis it puts food on her family’s table.

Ridley Scott once said of his road movie classic Thelma and Louise that only a British director could make miles of telegraph poles stretching into the vast American plains appear fascinating. Now with Hell or High Water, Mackenzie has performed a similarly astonishing feat, managing to energise and revitalise both a landscape and a genre that are etched into the very fabric of cinema itself.