MikeKardec
One Too Many
- Messages
- 1,157
- Location
- Los Angeles
A very good "Western" written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, a long time actor and the writer of the excellent Sicrio and Hell or High Water.
A death from exposure directly related to what seems to be a serious felony on an Indian reservation creates a situation where a young female FBI agent is sent to investigate. Since the death cannot be immediately be ruled a homicide, a team of more senior agents cannot yet be called in, so she must work with the understaffed Tribal Police and a local Fish and Game Officer to discover what happened.
In exploring the tangled culture of modern Native Americans, their close Anglo neighbors, dysfunctional families, and people from further afield who don't understand these lifelong relationships, this film pays homage to the late great Mystery novelist Tony Hillerman.
The performances are all excellent. Jeremy Renner holds the film together as the Fish and Game Officer who both both finds the body and volunteers to help the investigation for deeply personal reasons. Elizabeth Olsen is wonderful as the Florida native FBI agent who is ridiculously out of her depth yet develops a surprising and forceful competence. Graham Greene is as good as ever as the head of the Tribal Police and both Gil Birmingham and Jon Bernthal are highly effective creating fully rounded characters in what would otherwise be very limited roles. Bernthal and excellent choices in the writing manage to do this within less than 5 minutes!
There are a few problems but none that really matters. One is that a significant choice is made to present the story of the crime all at once in an unexpected flashback. This is worked in artfully at a point that makes some sense in typical Hollywood story structure but a less conventional approach might have been to position it later, using the last bad guy as the 'way into it." This would have left the main characters screaming for clarity in the midst of a hugely dramatic action scene and heightened the tension all around. On the other hand, it would have been more difficult to understand the nobility of one of the minor characters and would have "flattened out" a film which is dedicated to the humanity of it cast above and beyond the plot. I'm cheating when I mention this because it's always stupidly easy to reconstruct a good movie to be better after you've seen it rather than to write a fantastic one to begin with. The choices above would have had to be made in writing rather than the editing room.
In the ending there are also some technical issues about where it's coldest, the qualities of radiant heat, and how quickly some aspects of cold can kill you. It's only a bit of a stretch and only noticeable if you've spent a good deal of time in extreme cold or high mountains. The problem is that it was easily fixed and was probably because of the choice of a particular dramatic, hard to reach, yet limited in its usefulness, location. Only an issue because the director was the writer and a few lines or a slightly different way of shooting might have fixed it. Big outdoor films, especially in the cold and snow (you get one take, then you have footprints) are an exercise in Murphy's Law so you just do your best.
A terrific and reasonably priced movie. This should be (and once was) the norm in Hollywood.
A death from exposure directly related to what seems to be a serious felony on an Indian reservation creates a situation where a young female FBI agent is sent to investigate. Since the death cannot be immediately be ruled a homicide, a team of more senior agents cannot yet be called in, so she must work with the understaffed Tribal Police and a local Fish and Game Officer to discover what happened.
In exploring the tangled culture of modern Native Americans, their close Anglo neighbors, dysfunctional families, and people from further afield who don't understand these lifelong relationships, this film pays homage to the late great Mystery novelist Tony Hillerman.
The performances are all excellent. Jeremy Renner holds the film together as the Fish and Game Officer who both both finds the body and volunteers to help the investigation for deeply personal reasons. Elizabeth Olsen is wonderful as the Florida native FBI agent who is ridiculously out of her depth yet develops a surprising and forceful competence. Graham Greene is as good as ever as the head of the Tribal Police and both Gil Birmingham and Jon Bernthal are highly effective creating fully rounded characters in what would otherwise be very limited roles. Bernthal and excellent choices in the writing manage to do this within less than 5 minutes!
There are a few problems but none that really matters. One is that a significant choice is made to present the story of the crime all at once in an unexpected flashback. This is worked in artfully at a point that makes some sense in typical Hollywood story structure but a less conventional approach might have been to position it later, using the last bad guy as the 'way into it." This would have left the main characters screaming for clarity in the midst of a hugely dramatic action scene and heightened the tension all around. On the other hand, it would have been more difficult to understand the nobility of one of the minor characters and would have "flattened out" a film which is dedicated to the humanity of it cast above and beyond the plot. I'm cheating when I mention this because it's always stupidly easy to reconstruct a good movie to be better after you've seen it rather than to write a fantastic one to begin with. The choices above would have had to be made in writing rather than the editing room.
In the ending there are also some technical issues about where it's coldest, the qualities of radiant heat, and how quickly some aspects of cold can kill you. It's only a bit of a stretch and only noticeable if you've spent a good deal of time in extreme cold or high mountains. The problem is that it was easily fixed and was probably because of the choice of a particular dramatic, hard to reach, yet limited in its usefulness, location. Only an issue because the director was the writer and a few lines or a slightly different way of shooting might have fixed it. Big outdoor films, especially in the cold and snow (you get one take, then you have footprints) are an exercise in Murphy's Law so you just do your best.
A terrific and reasonably priced movie. This should be (and once was) the norm in Hollywood.
