Weekend Watch: ‘Hell or High Water’ Is a Modern Western Done Masterfully Right

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It’s remarkable how many tropes from the classic westerns still apply when it comes to modernizing the genre. Guns? Still there? Sheriffs? Them too. There are still banks to be robbed, climactic shootouts to be undertaken, and long stares promising retribution to be stared. Pretty much the only thing that’s changed has been trading in horses for cars. While it may not have been the foremost concern on director David Mackenzie’s mind, Hell or High Water revives the western in much the same way that the Coen brothers did with No Country for Old Men, telling a story of economic opportunism through a prism of sheriffs and getaways and bags of stolen money. Where No Country told their story as an ultimate morality play between flawed good and indomitable evil, Hell or High Water has its feet planted firmly in the ground.

Directing from a screenplay by actor Taylor Sheridan — who, between writing the scripts for this movie and last year’s Sicario, should probably ditch his journeyman TV-guest-star career for good — Mackenzie is meticulous about rooting his story firmly amid 2016’s economic realities. Graffiti in an early establishing shot bemoans the banks that got bailed out while the working class got stiffed, and it’s those same banks that stay at the center of the story. They’re there when brothers Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) bluntly and officially rob a pair of banks in the film’s opening minutes. They’re there when we find out the motivation for the crime spree is to keep the home of the Howard boys’ deceased and decidedly un-sainted mother from defaulting to those very banks. They’re there when the Texas Ranger set on the trail of the Howard boys, played with an old-coot glint in his eye by Jeff Bridges, muses on the stranglehold that these banks have on the lives of the West Texans they’re policing.

Bridges, it should be noted, has seemingly aged thirty years in the last ten, suddenly presenting as an old, teeth-sucking, harmlessly racist codger who needles his partner (Gilm Birmingham) with an endless string of poor-taste jokes about Native Americans. He’s having an absolute ball with the role, but just when you think the entirety of a performance is a lark on the part of a veteran actor, he brings the film home in the final half hour. He’s a lot of fun to watch.

Mackenzie, who previously directed the Irish prison drama Starred Up (which, if you haven’t seen, you should), once again puts a lot of story into a little space. The dynamic between the Howard boys is crackling and alive; Toby’s the Good Criminal you’re used to seeing in movies like these, while Tanner is a loose cannon who’s getting a bit too much of a thrill as the threat of violence creeps closer and closer as an inevitability. The robberies are meticulously planned, and it’s undeniably fun to watch the brothers pull them off, burying their getaway cars and neatly laundering the cash at nearby reservation casinos. There’s a physical geography that Mackenzie keeps that allows the audience to be complicit with the brothers’ plans and with Bridges as he tracks them.

But with every phase of the plan, things get a little more ragged, and Tanner gets a little bit closer to doing this his way. And you get the idea that doing things Tanner’s way means a lot more dead bodies. There’s a fatalism to both brothers that’s poignant. Toby’s doing this all so he can leave the family home (which is about to become oil-rich) to his semi-estranged son; Tanner’s doing this because it’s all he’s got to do. He’s been in and out of prison, and it turns out that this is what he’s good at. West Texas hasn’t presented these boys with too many opportunities, and this is what it’s come down to.

Hell or High Water played the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard program, which should give you a sense of the film’s ambition. It’s a visceral good time, but it’s a movie that’s got something to say, if you’re listening.

[You can rent or buy Hell or High Water on Amazon Video or iTunes.]