Hell or High Water (2016)
Directed by David Mackenzie
A divorced dad and his ex-con brother resort to a desperate scheme in order to save their family's farm in West Texas.
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They are stealing too little to generate FBI interest but more than enough to catch the eye of about-to-retire Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges borrowing a few notes from Tommy Lee Jones in "No Country for Old Men").
Jeff Bridges, borrowing Tommy Lee Jones’ character from “No Country for Old Men,” plays a retirement-bound Texas Ranger who finds it amusing to pursue one last caper: Two outlaws are robbing a series of banks in a very strange way.
Like a less cynical, less open-ended 'No Country For Old Men'…
More often than not, however, it tries so hard to emulate the likes of “ No Country for Old Men ” at times that you can feel it practically straining from the effort without quite pulling it off.
It’s a modern-day Western along the lines of “No Country for Old Men” with a mixture of dry humor, unsettling violence and an examination of inner clockwork of damaged men in a damaged world.
Not since "No Country for Old Men" has a modern Western been so thematically rich.
He works in references to other films, Westerns and neo-Westerns, that deal with similar issues — “Badlands,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” the Coens’ “True Grit” (which also featured Bridges), any number of old Westerns about Jesse and Frank James , and maybe even “No Country for Old Men.”
You might have to go back to 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde to find a film about bank robbers that feels as of its time as David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water.
Mackenzie’s film quietly updates the themes and sensibility of Bonnie and Clyde.
From Zorro to Scarface to Batman to Bonnie and Clyde, the devilish allure of seeking justice and fulfillment outside of convention and societal rubrics has fascinated audiences since the early days of film, and the idea of the outlaw remains as ripe for rumination and trigger-happy entertainment as ever.
It's a familiar story with a familiar populist undercurrent, reminiscent of '60s and '70s flicks such as Bonnie and Clyde and Dog Day Afternoon.
It's much more even than a very fine entry in the long line of outlaw road movies, going back through Bonnie and Clyde and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot .
The last scenes are especially satisfying, both in movie terms — with the cliff-side echoes of Bogart in “High Sierra” (1941) and Kirk Douglas in “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962) — and in the final moral calculus of banker, lawman, farmer, thief.
Hamilton gets two very different final confrontations with the brothers, one a violent, action-filled shootout that recalls the end of Kirk Douglas classic Lonely Are the Brave, the other a tense conversation filled with resentful yet respectful subtext.
He works in references to other films, Westerns and neo-Westerns, that deal with similar issues — “Badlands,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” the Coens’ “True Grit” (which also featured Bridges), any number of old Westerns about Jesse and Frank James , and maybe even “No Country for Old Men.”
Channeling the open-plains lyricism of Terrence Malick’s 1973 masterpiece Badlands and its modern spiritual offspring, Andrew Dominik’s 2007 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (not to mention David Lowery’s even more recent Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water concerns two brothers on a bank-robbing spree through West Texas, and the just-shy-of-retirement ranger intent on catching them.
“Two-Lane Blacktop,” “Vanishing Point,” “Badlands.”
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Hell or High Water isn’t a flashy movie, but it has an undeniably resonant sense of small-scale justice, not to mention an authentic sense of place that will remind you of other Texas-set masterpieces like John Sayles’ Lone Star and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
Playing the lawman, Bridges, looking like Kris Kristofferson from “Lone Star,” shines as a plainspoken man grieving the end of his career.
And it doesn’t hurt that the cinematography of longtime collaborator Giles Nuttgens is lustrous and dusky in equal measure, capturing dying and dead towns and vast landscape with the acuity of Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” or as a less languorous, less brightly-colored parallel to Wim Wenders and Robby Müller’s “Paris, Texas.”
The last scenes are especially satisfying, both in movie terms — with the cliff-side echoes of Bogart in “High Sierra” (1941) and Kirk Douglas in “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962) — and in the final moral calculus of banker, lawman, farmer, thief.
His new film utilizes Western imagery (one shot of Bridges deliberately evokes Henry Fonda’s famous porch lean from My Darling Clementine ) but it still feels fresh and contemporary.
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Courtesy of Pine and Foster’s superbly lived-in performances, Toby and Tanner’s fury at their unjust economic mistreatment is visible in their determined, sorrowful eyes, and doesn’t require the film to belabor its The Grapes of Wrath-ish point through overt statements of purpose.
But there are no — thank God — visual allusions to John Ford’s film of The Grapes of Wrath, which turned the Joad family into icons of working-class integrity under duress.
“Hell or High Water” has an understanding of what drives ordinary people to commit crime that links it to the lyrical hunger and despair of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song.”