“My coward ex is runnin' from the law,” say many 20-something American women, exasperatedly (but also with a hint of pride) of the delinquents they’ve dated. “Coward” usually means there’s a baby involved. The young ladies would take that bad boy back in a heartbeat, though.
Movie heartthrob Chris Pine plays one such bank-robbing ne'er-do-well in “Hell or High Water,” a Texan slow dance of a what could be described as a post-Occupy Wall Street movement Neo-Western.
In-law Outlaws
The Howard boys are odd-couple brothers: Tanner (Ben Foster) is a shot-his-daddy, went-to-jail, sociopathic drifter; Toby (Pine) is the soulful, handsome devil outlaw with a buried streak of virtue that makes this archetype irresistible to certain women.
The brothers are perpetrating Basic Bank Stickups 101; they’re avoiding the vaults and dye-bomb-protected big-bill packets. Instead, they’re just cleaning out teller cash drawers and leaving telltale patterns and psychological insights for savvy old lawmen to follow.
Tanner provides the hair-raising, seat-of-his-pants embellishments to their bank-heist plans, but despite these boneheaded moves, the bank-heist brother team is not dumb. Toby’s good with a bulldozer, which might account for the complete disappearance of their collection of getaway cars.
Why the Law Gets Broke
Toby’s hidden virtue is that, while his blond, Texan ex-wife hates his heretofore deadbeat guts, and his straight-edge footballer teenage son is hostile, Toby yearns to do the right thing. He'd like to exorcise his own dad’s hand-me-down deadbeat demons, break the poverty cycle, and provide.He'd like to keep the family’s oil-rich ranch out of Midland Bank’s foreclosure machinations. He doesn’t know how to get it done lawfully, so he intends to pay the bank back with the stolen money it stole from his family. Outlaw poetic justice.
Toby and Tanner are runnin' from an all-ranger version of the Lone Ranger and Tonto: Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and his Comanche-Mexican deputy and sidekick Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham). These two make up the film’s second odd couple.
Bridges’s Marcus is a homespun-but-acerbic widower sheriff with a dreaded porch-and-rocking-chair retirement looming.
Alberto’s an overly earnest, kindly man and an irresistibly (for Marcus) easy joke target. Marcus. just. can’t. help himself. He must constantly and ruthlessly let the stuffing out of the long-suffering Alberto with nonstop, Tommy Lee Jones-style deadpan (and completely un-P.C.) racial ribbing.
It’s a running gag. At first wince-worthy, it picks up hilarity as the movie shuffles along at Texas-speed, and it dawns on us that these two are really an old married couple, with great, unspoken, manly man affection for each other.
Speaking of which, the Howard boys also have a powerful brotherly love. With bickering. Call “High Water” a rambling, muted, Texan hetero man-love movie.
Stellar Performances
Bridges does an “it’s-a-quality-film-so-now-I’m-motivated” version of the over-the-top, Western-twang schtick he'd been adopting for a string of films now (the worst of it pervading “R.I.P.D.” and “Seventh Son,” and the best reserved for “True Grit” and “Crazy Heart”). His portrayal of Marcus is lots of fun.
Foster is a character actor’s character actor. To have witnessed his acting arc from the artsy, schlemiel boyfriend on HBO’s “Six Feet Under” to the tough Navy SEAL of “Lone Survivor” is to understand camera acting shape-shifting.
Pine’s the rare kind of handsome that can wear the mustache well—just the ’stache—without American society’s current knee-jerk snicker reaction to mustaches’ reminding everyone of ‘70s porn stars. Not easy to pull off. Who are our great mustache wearers? Tom Selleck, of course, and Robert Redford, but most of all—Sam Elliot.
Keep an eye out for character actress Dale Dickey’s hilarious, tough-as-rawhide diner waitress intimidating the tough lawmen.
State of the Nation
In the 2010s, actual bank robbery was, er, a little outdated. Per the Occupy Wall Street outlook, most “99-percenters” suspected that the true outlaws were the banks themselves. As poignant graffiti shown in a Texas parking lot attests in the film’s opening: “Three tours in Iraq, but no bailout for people like us.”So are the banks really the outlaws? Certainly the tellers and branch managers in Midland, Texas, are not. They’re just small-fry folks trying to eke out a living like anybody else. The 1-percenter upper management types, as depicted here, are a different story, though.
But like that parking lot graffiti forewarned, probably when our returning combat vets consider the living options that banks offer (like homelessness), their low opinion of robber banks may go lower. And if Canada’s current response to the anti-vaccine trucker convoy (freezing bank accounts) is emulated by American politicians in the coming weeks—lower still.
“Hell or High Water” has a lot of gritty, low-rent, beat-down, small-town Americana; lots of cowboy-hatted, conceal-and-carry citizen-arrest zeal; great performances; a killer soundtrack; and a very post-Occupy coda, wherein men speak of peace and redemption. Amen to peace and redemption.
