Restless on the Rez

Take note of this name, and look for her films – Chloé Zhao.  She grew up in Beijing, but was educated in the West, high school in London and LA, then Mt. Holyoke College and NYU film school.  But her restless cosmopolitan energy found its focus on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, where she has made two films in a unique blend of documentary and narrative.  I went into The Rider (MC-92, NFX) not knowing what to expect, based strictly on a Metacritic rating that placed it among the best films of 2018 to date.  Not knowing what to expect is the best way to approach the film, as you have to continuously interrogate what you are seeing.  Is this real?  How did they get that shot?  What is intimate access, and what is staging?  So I recommend watching the DVD extras after the film, for some answers and orientation.  I’m not going to give anything away, except to say that Brady Jandreau plays (superbly) Brady Blackburn, who like him has sustained a head injury while rodeo riding.  His sister and father play his sister and father, in a seamless blend of script and improvisation.  Brady is a master of training wild horses, and his duets with various equines are masterpieces of inter-species communication, reminiscent of the great horse-whisperer documentary Buck.  Ms. Zhao and her film-school-classmate cinematographer Joshua James Richards have a marvelous feel for landscape and light, mixing light and dark in mood as well.  A latter-day cowboy story set in Western twilight, The Rider is deeply beautiful, deeply truthful, and deeply affecting. 

The same crew in the same setting, with the same method and some of the same performers, earlier made Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2016, MC-63, NFX), which made for a promising debut, but The Rider is the complete fulfillment of that promise.

Another late addition, falling under this rubric, is Wind River (MC-73, NFX), set on the Wyoming reservation of the title.  After success with the screenplays of Sicario and Hell or High Water, Taylor Sheridan gets to direct his own script for the first time, and does a decent job, aided by a superlative performance from Jeremy Renner, and good support all round.  But that’s the problem right there, why does a film set on a Native American reservation center on a white man?  And on the green FBI agent played rather implausibly by Elizabeth Olsen?  And then there’s my confirmed distaste for any more movies involving the rape and murder of young women.  But Renner (along with the snowy high-country landscapes) makes the film continuously watchable; he’s a wildlife service hunter who’s enlisted to help solve human rather than lupine predation.  Some aspects of the sociology of the rez come through, but the Tarantino-like thriller tropes distract rather than enhance.

Re-formation?

To write about film, or not to write about film?  That is the question.  Or the one I’m asking myself right now.  After a half-year of preoccupation with family health matters, I am deciding which writing projects to revive.  I’m going to start by writing up a few eminently recommendable recent films, which are easy to praise, and then I’ll do a lengthy but cursory round-up of what I’ve been watching lately, and see if that seems to have any point.  Feel free to weigh in with comments.

First Reformed (MC-85, NFX) represents committed work by all involved, and is intensely watchable, if dark and disturbing.  It’s somehow fitting that Paul Schrader’s career-summing mash-up of Bresson and Bergman is being marketed as a horror film, given the previews on the DVD.  This is Taxi Driver meets Last Temptation of Christ (two of the films Schrader wrote for Scorsese), plus Diary of a Country Priest meets Winter Light.  It’s bleak and beautiful, stark and thought-provoking.  Ethan Hawke’s performance truly makes the film; I’m fully ready to anoint him as the best American actor of his generation, certainly with the greatest filmography.  He’s the pastor of a small historic church in upstate New York; from a line of ministers, his faith has been shaken by the death of a son and subsequent divorce from his wife.  He’s in bad shape, physically and spiritually.  Amanda Seyfried is a young pregnant wife who comes to him for help and guidance.  (That she is named Mary is indicative of Schrader’s willingness to be obvious, as well as subtle and restrained.)  He uses the borrowed set-up to make trenchant comments on contemporary themes, from megachurches to environmental catastrophe to domestic terrorism, while mastering the interiority of a tortured soul.  Appropriate to both his models and the constriction of his Dutch Calvinist upbringing, Schrader confines his film to an old-fashioned aspect ratio, with a stationary camera except for a few bravura moves in what might be taken as fantasy sequences, which will tend to mollify or alienate various viewers.  Not to everyone’s taste, this is a film that is both derivative and very much its own thing.