As it turns out, when John Wayne and company complete their long cattle drive at the end of Red River, after fighting off Indians and Mexicans along the way, they aren’t guaranteed a life happily ever after back on their ranch.
Likewise, after Clint Eastwood fights off the sadistic U.S. Army officers who pursue The Outlaw Josey Wales as he starts a new life in Texas, his bloody victory doesn’t necessarily mean his descendants will enjoy prosperity for generations to come.
The bankers, Hell or High Water tells us, were lying in wait all along.
Fast forward 150 years or so, and we’re in the West Texas of director David MacKenzie’s new film. Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster), brothers faced with losing their family farm, turn to bank robbery as a solution. They’ll pay back their usurious lenders with the lenders’ own money. They’ll hit the banks early in the morning, only at small branches in sleepy little towns where they’re unlikely to run into many people. They want enough cash only to pay off their lien and to protect the farm with a trust for Toby’s sons. They also don’t expect to get away with it. They talk like two men on a suicide mission.
After their first two heists, a pair of Texas Rangers are dispatched in pursuit. Curmudgeonly Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), in the grand tradition of cinematic law enforcement officers, is taking on this one last assignment before retirement beckons. His partner, Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham), is of Native American and Mexican descent, and Hamilton pokes fun at that heritage. The two of them affectionately spar like an old married couple.
Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay successfully fleshes out these four principals so well that I found myself simultaneously rooting for the Howards to get away with their scheme and for the Rangers to catch them at it. MacKenzie injects the film with an underlying sense of menace — his camera looking again and again upon landscapes cluttered with oil wells and billboards offering payday loans. But even as we suspect that the story is headed for a violent showdown, it’s a lot of fun.
There’s much humor laced throughout as both the Rangers and the robbers encounter a series of minor characters who have their own lives to live, thank you very much, and aren’t merely going to bend their ways to accommodate these out-of-towners.
Hell or High Water would make for a wonderfully sardonic double feature with any old Western in which the heroes overcome adversity to stake their claim to a piece of the frontier. How could Duke or the Man With No Name have anticipated their descendants would be done in by reverse mortgages and cheap oil?
