The Part-Time Critic

• The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976): After Yankees burn down his house and kill his family, Josey Wales joins a band of Confederate marauders during the Civil War. After hostilities end, Josey refuses to swear loyalty to the Union (becoming the titular outlaw) and the movies turns into a kind of road trip movie as Josey makes his way to Mexico, encountering cavalry, Cherokee, Comanche, and bounty hunters. I really wanted to love this Western, but if I’m being honest, the different sequences on his way to Texas/Mexico are uneven, the action is mostly forgettable, and the film ends up being just too long. 
• News of the World (2020): This film is the first re-teaming of Tom Hanks and Paul Greengrass since their excellent 2013 collaboration Captain Phillips. The thought of one of my favorite actors and directors tackling the Western genre had me excited. Tom Hanks plays a Civil War veteran Captain Kidd who has taken up traveling town to town to read the news to small gatherings who can’t. In his travels, he comes across an abandoned white girl who has been raised by Kiowa Indians. When authorities don’t step up to return her home, Captain Kidd determines to do it himself. The film does a wonderful job capturing the feel of reconstructionist Texas after the Civil War with the presence of Union soldiers, the anger at the North, and the politics of getting back into the Union all filling in the background and context of the film. The film does take an odd detour for an “action” scene in the hills that feels somewhat unconnected to the rest of the story for such an involved and long sequence. The best scene in the film sees a self-serving town dictator force Hanks to read his personally written news to a town gathering. Hanks subversively reads the story of another town, parable like, encouraging the citizens to stand up. The message that in hearing the news and stories of others struggling and surviving around the world, we can understand they are more like us than not. It’s a comforting message.

• Sicario (2015): Written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by Denis Villeneuve, Sicario engages the viewer from the first shot to the last. It’s one of those movies that kicks protected, middle-class, suburban people (like me) in their gut and forces them to see unpleasant things we’d like to forget exists outside our bubble. The lawless frontier space of the usual Western is replaced here with the lawless border area and the drug trade. Sheridan's screenplay explores the question of how civilized, protected, and sophisticated people should react to the seemingly purposeless violence that comes with the drug trade. Does turning a cheek work? What happens when the wolves are able to bypass the fence and the laws? Are you willing to turn into a wolf yourself? Incredible stuff here.
• Wind River (2017): The film opens with a wolf stalking a group of sheep only to have Jeremy Renner's wildlife/game guardian take a few wolves out. It's not subtle, but the opening scene tells you everything about the tone of what's going to happen next. Wind River is more evidence that no one in film is currently exploring the realities of how we deal with suffering and violence better than Taylor Sheridan. The plot of a small-scale murder mystery on a snow-blown Indian reservation (taking the place of the usual Western's open plains) allows Sheridan the space to explore how humans handle violence and isolation. The engaging murder procedural story is interrupted with bursts of shocking violence and mournful reflection. Remember that melancholic scene in No Country for Old Men where the isolated old-timer Ellis tells Tommy Lee Jones the violent story of Uncle Mac’s murder by Indians? It’s as if Sheridan made an entire film around the tone of that sequence and it turned out to be the best film of 2017. 

“But Munny makes the mistake first of returning to killing (however different his motives this time) and second of pulling Ned with him. When this happens the results are different from what was anticipated (this too is morally instructive). It is Ned who is punished for the transgression, a transgression he did not truly commit; Munny does everything and goes free, and gets paid to boot. It is not just that any notion of a higher system of justice and moral equilibrium is derisorily contradicted by this development. The death of Ned is also Munny’s personal loss of his “good” self, his loss of Claudia’s forgiveness and his own self-forgiveness. When he walks into Greely’s to kill Skinny and Little Bill he is a creature who has lost salvation, a damned soul, “unforgiven.”