MOVIE REVIEW: At long last, a movie for adults, come Hell or High Water

Brothers Tanner (Ben Foster) and Toby (Chris Pine) resort to desperate measures to try to save their family’s farm in rural West Texas in Hell or High Water.
Brothers Tanner (Ben Foster) and Toby (Chris Pine) resort to desperate measures to try to save their family’s farm in rural West Texas in Hell or High Water.

Come the dog days of August, film critics can expect to see a lot of things up on the silver screen as studios, having finally exhausted their stockpile of tent-pole offerings, empty out the rest of their wares like someone opening a purse and dumping the remaining contents on the floor. One thing we would not expect to see, however, is a genuine, honest-to-god denouement.

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Ex-con Tanner (Ben Foster) prepares to take his revenge on a predatory bank in David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water, a film that’s drawing comparisons to modern classic Westerns such as Lone Star and No

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Texas Rangers Marcus (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto (Gil Birmingham) investigate a string of small town bank robberies in David Mackenzie’s heist film Hell or High Water.

Yet, here, in David Mackenzie's riveting bank heist drama Hell or High Water, that's exactly what we're given. Near the end of the film, we're on the porch of a Texas ranch, the sun-baked prairie in the background, where an aged, retired Texas ranger goes to meet a man he still suspects of committing a crime. The two men talk, the ranger sits down, avails himself of a proffered beer, and they get to the business of what bloody fate might yet befall them should they happen to meet later on.

Hell or High Water

90 Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Dale Dickey, Gil Birmingham, Buck Taylor

Director: David Mackenzie

Rating: R, for some strong violence, suggestive language throughout and brief sexuality

Running time: 102 minutes

Clearly, we're dealing with a different order of cinema here, thank the heavens, one that asks you to feel something beyond mindlesscomputer-generated imagery saturation. Marcus, the aging ranger, is played by Jeff Bridges with white hair, a bushy moustache and a voice like hickory smoke, curling past his lips. Along with his partner Alberto (Gil Birmingham), part American Indian which the elderly ranger, with his endless bevy of racial jokes, never lets him forget, Marcus is assigned a case involving a pair of bank robbers, making their rounds on smaller west Texas banks, only taking the small bills (which are untraceable) and moving methodically toward a purpose as yet unknown.

The robbers are a pair of brothers, older Tanner (Ben Foster), an ex-con with a wild streak and some high-powered guns he likes to travel with, and younger, somewhat more level-headed Toby (Chris Pine), a divorced man with a pair of teenage sons living elsewhere, having just presided over the decline and death of their mama. Before she died, she made up her will, leaving the ranch house -- with its newly discovered rich oil wells -- to Toby, who intends to put it into a trust for his sons. Unfortunately, she has also left a terrible reverse mortgage situation on the place, a deal which the local bank is all too ready to foreclose upon in order to seize the newly lucrative land. Perhaps you can see where this is all going.

Like most good bank robbery pictures, the protagonists actually have something more of an understandable agenda for their ill-gotten fortune (think Dog Day Afternoon as one example), which makes them deeply sympathetic. This tension, in turn, allows the audience to feel every beat and pulse of this carefully orchestrated film, whose rising tautness is augmented with subtle sound cues -- the rusty squeal of an aeration windmill, the buzz of an insect's wings in the endless heat -- and a commendable pacing that never succumbs to the growing narrative push.

Atmospherically, Mackenzie, along with crack cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, have drenched the film in dust, heat and despair. Driving through these small, dead-end Texas towns, passing endless billboards advertising "Debt Relief" and "Fast Cash," there is the distinct sense that a way of life endemic to these ranchers and oil cats is slowly being throttled by the banks that foreclose on them, amid a world that doesn't have the same need for the land's natural deposits (Toby tells a waitress he used to work on a natural gas line but that job, like the rest of the economy, dried up).

The film is also populated by the denizens of the area, with no character merely a throwaway role: There's a polecat of a waitress, who informs the rangers what their lunch will consist of in no uncertain terms; an elderly bystander in one of the banks the boys rob, who immediately grabs his gun and starts firing at their getaway car; a world-weary bank teller who tells them all they're guilty of is "being stupid"; and a pair of scrubby boys looking for trouble in a gas station, that only add to the film's geographic authenticity and richness.

Bridges, as always, is a joy to experience, digging into his role with unbridled gusto -- that closing scene is a master class in reserved emotional potency and subdued tension. Pine, too, is somewhat surprisingly solid, but Foster is the goldmine in the film, imbibing Tanner with a hedonist recklessness and a pure sense of what he amounts to: Even his line reading of what Tanner wants Toby to get him from a gas station mini-mart ("Dr Pepper, Winston Lights") resonates into something compelling. Long one of Hollywood's best character chameleons, Foster dips so deep here with his Morgan Spurlock handlebar and his wild-eyed cavorting, he's almost unrecognizable.

Powered by a thoughtful script by actor-turned-screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (who also wrote last year's Sicario), the film does follow a more than recognizable plot trajectory and is loaded with a bevy of comic turns (Alberto's long-suffering stoicism as the endless butt of Marcus' gibes gives the duo the practiced air of a Borscht Belt comic team), but make no mistake: This is a soulful film, truly intended for adults. Hate to be the bearer of woeful tidings, kids, but summer's end is nigh. It's high time movie screens were released back to the grown-ups for a while.

MovieStyle on 08/19/2016

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