The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Mackenzie · a film · 2016 · about 102 minutes · directed by David Mackenzie, written by Taylor Sheridan · in English, with a few lines of Spanish
Mode
Contemporary western and heist film in one; a crime story built as an argument about debt and land
Mythos
The good brother and the wild one; the old lawman on the plains; the outlaw’s last stand; the frontier that never closed, the land taken again
Phase
A run of bank robberies across West Texas, from a first morning to a last stand on a ridge, then a payment at the bank and a meeting on a ranch porch
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 102 minutes, in English with a few lines of Spanish; Giles Nuttgens’s photography, Jake Roberts’s cutting, music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
Register
Dry, laconic and comic, under hard light over wide empty land; dread rising at the last robbery and on the ridge, and violence held under quiet words at the close
Scale
Four men on two roads, one bank, one ranch, and a country stripped of what it had
Governing Proposition
Two brothers rob the branches of one bank to pay that bank the debt on their dead mother’s ranch, and two Texas Rangers follow them across the same flat country. The wager of the film is that in the country after 2008 debt is the latest form of an old dispossession, that the land the bank takes lawfully from the ranchers was taken before from the Comanche, and that the law and the outlaw, two men in a car on the same roads, are mirrored pairs.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on one continuous travelling shot round the car park of a small bank. Before anyone speaks the camera takes in the place: an empty lot, a flat town, and graffiti on a wall about tours in Iraq and no bailout. Then the robbers go in, and the first robbery begins. The world is laid out before the story, and the story is shown to be one of the world’s consequences.
The men are brothers. Toby Howard, played by Chris Pine, is divorced, with two sons, closed and careful; Tanner, played by Ben Foster, has done time in prison and is reckless, funny and quick to violence. Their mother has died, and the ranch she left them is under a reverse mortgage to the Texas Midland Bank, which will take it unless the debt is paid. There is oil under the land. Toby’s plan is to rob branches of that bank and pay the bank with its own money.
David Mackenzie directed the film from a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan. It was photographed by Giles Nuttgens, edited by Jake Roberts, and scored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and it runs about 102 minutes, in English with a few lines of Spanish. It was shot in New Mexico, standing in for West Texas. It premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard in May 2016 and was released in the United States in August by CBS Films, with Lionsgate.
Movement II
The plan is a procedure, and the film shows each part of it. The brothers rob only Texas Midland branches. They take only small loose bills. Each rule is the plan made visible, and each sets up a scene that will come later. The heist film’s pleasure in method is kept, and the method is turned toward a single creditor.
The takings are laundered at a casino on Comanche land, through its chips and its tables, where a Comanche plays at the poker table. White men gamble in a house built on land that was taken, and the money from one bank goes through the casino to be paid back to that bank. The film shows the circuit without stating it.
Behind the plan is an inheritance. Toby speaks of poverty passed from parent to child like a disease, and his crime is an act of fatherhood: the oil is to go into a trust for his sons, who will not be poor. Tanner has been in prison, and it was he who killed their father; it is given in a few lines and left there. The good brother needs the wild one, and the wild one knows it.
Movement III
Two Texas Rangers take the case. Marcus Hamilton, played by Jeff Bridges, is near retirement, slow, mumbling and sharp; his partner, Alberto Parker, played by Gil Birmingham, is half Comanche, and Hamilton teases him about it without pause. The film cuts between the two cars across the same empty roads: two men in each, ribbing each other, the law and the outlaw driving the same country, mirrored pair against pair.
At a steakhouse the old waitress takes the Rangers’ order with one question, “What don’t you want?”, and the comedy is broad. In a diner another waitress keeps the tip the robbers left her, because it pays her rent, and will not hand it to the law. On the road the Rangers pass a cowboy driving cattle ahead of a grass fire, who says no one young will do this work. The film’s world is carried by people at its edges.
Watching a bank from the car, Alberto tells Hamilton what the country was: his ancestors’ land, taken by the settlers, and now taken again by the banks. It is the film’s one statement of its thesis, and it is said by the partner the lawman mocks. Everywhere else the film shows it: foreclosure signs, signs for debt relief, boarded towns, oil pumps nodding in empty fields, and a bank doing lawfully what was once done by force.
Movement IV
The last robbery goes wrong. In a small town the citizens come out armed and give chase, and Tanner turns a rifle on their truck. The dread that the dry comedy has held down rises at once, and the town that the film has shown as emptied of everything turns out still to own its guns.
Tanner takes a ridge above the valley with a long rifle and fires down at the law. He kills Alberto. Hamilton kills Tanner, who dies in the scrub. The wild brother has given his life to let the good one go free, and the debt between them, the father’s killing, is paid in the only coin Tanner has. The outlaw’s last stand is staged with clear geography and mounting force.
The genre’s oldest scene is played out on the land the film has been arguing about. The outlaw on high ground, the posse below, the lawman’s partner dead: the western is built here, not borrowed as decoration. And the man who dies first is the Comanche, whose people lost this land before the ranchers did. Hamilton is left with his partner dead and the outlaw he shot.
Movement V
Toby pays the debt at the bank with the bank’s own money, and the ranch is saved. The oil goes into a trust for his sons, and the trust is administered by the Texas Midland. The robbery, the debt and the dispossession close as one act: the land is held now by the institution that would have taken it, for the children the crime was committed for.
The film closes on the ranch porch, where Hamilton and Toby speak quietly, with violence held under the words. Between them lie the robberies and two dead men. A reckoning is offered and deferred. Whether the close promises a settling of accounts or an accommodation between two men who have each lost a partner is left open.
The film received four Academy Award nominations, for Best Picture, Supporting Actor for Bridges, Original Screenplay and Film Editing, and won none. It stands at the centre of its writer’s run of contemporary westerns, between Sicario and Wind River, and has been read since as a document of the country after 2008. What it has made is a western whose frontier never closed: a bank, a ranch, two pairs of men on the same roads, and land taken again.
Act III · The Twelve
The film is lean, and its plants pay. The reverse mortgage and the oil under the mother’s land are the motive and the end: the brothers rob the bank to pay the bank with its own money, and the trust that keeps the oil for Toby’s sons is administered by that bank. Each procedure is the plan made visible and sets up a later scene: only Texas Midland branches, only small loose bills, the takings laundered at a casino. Tanner’s prison years and the father he killed are given in a few lines and pay on the ridge. The two waitresses look like digressions and carry the film’s world. What gives: the Rangers’ ribbing returns more often than it needs to, and the cattle drive before the grass fire nearly stands free.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: in the country after 2008, debt is the form taken by an old dispossession, and the bank does lawfully to the ranchers what the settlers did to the Comanche. The film states it once, through Alberto watching a bank from the car, and shows it everywhere else: the graffiti in the opening shot, signs for debt relief, boarded towns, a casino on Comanche land where white men gamble. Image and sound carry it as fully as speech. Two truths stand beside it: poverty is inherited like a disease, and Toby’s crime is an act of fatherhood; and the law and the outlaw are the same old men. Held at the bar by the thesis stated in dialogue more than once, and by a robbery as justice the film half indulges.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The register is dry and comic, and elevation comes in a few places, each of them real. The land gives most of it: Nuttgens’s wide flat country under hard light, oil pumps nodding in empty fields, a grass fire on the horizon with cowboys driving cattle before it. Dread rises at the last robbery, when the town’s citizens come out armed and Tanner turns a rifle on their truck, and highest on the ridge, Tanner alone above the valley firing down at the law, then dying in the scrub. The porch is the last height, two men speaking quietly with violence held under the words. Held where it is by frequency: the heights are short, the comic and procedural stretches long, and the score at times supplies a lift the images have not earned.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The western is built, not merely evoked. Two brothers, the good one and the wild one; the wild one gives his life to let the good one go free, and the debt between them is a father’s crime. The old lawman near retirement hunts outlaws over the plains; the Comanche returns as the Ranger’s partner, as a player at the casino’s table, and as the people whose loss the whole drama repeats. Tanner on the ridge is the outlaw’s last stand. The particulars stay particular: the reverse mortgage, the trust deed, the chips, the tips. The structure bears weight, since the plot enacts the dispossession and the bank’s trust closes it: the frontier never closed. Held below the gate because the archetypes are the genre’s own, and the lawman follows the old sheriff of No Country for Old Men (2007).
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the western and the heist film, and more narrowly the contemporary western of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, with its laconic old lawman, empty Texas and dry humour. The turn is real: the genre is set in the economy after 2008, the outlaws rob a bank to save a ranch from that bank, and the film will not make the crime simple greed or simple justice. Giving the Comanche dispossession as the frame of the present is a real step. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake and the form: a mid-budget film with stars, in a proven genre and in the register of its writer’s Sicario (2015), whose storytelling never leaves the classical grammar. A swerve of subject and setting more than of form.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The parallel cutting between brothers and Rangers is the instrument of its central knowledge, that the law and the outlaw are mirrored pairs: two men in a car on the same empty roads, ribbing each other, the Ranger and his half-Comanche partner, the ex-convict and the father. The wide frame of empty land is the economic argument made visible: quiet towns, signs for debt relief, oil pumps in the fields. The robbery plot is the form of the debt, money taken from the bank to repay it. The cost: part of the form is the genre’s container, well filled rather than turned into knowledge; the Rangers’ investigation is procedure, and much of what the film knows is also said in words.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Ten years are the evidence, and the open questions are real and still argued: whether Toby is a hero or a man who let his brother die for him; whether the film endorses the robbery as justice or only understands it; whether Hamilton’s teasing of Alberto is affection, racism or both, and what his grief at the end is for; whether the last scene promises a reckoning or an accommodation. The film has been read as a document of the economy after 2008 and as an early sign of the politics of the rural interior made visible in the election that autumn. Return repays: the land, the performances, small things surfacing, the trust deed, the waitresses as the chorus of the place. Held by a decade’s short record and by meanings that cluster.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that the western could carry a present-day economic argument, with stars, wit and a strong sense of place, and set the dispossession of the Comanche under a story of foreclosure without a sermon. It perfected a register more than it reorganised what film can do, and it never left the genre’s grammar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in ten years the film has become the central work of its writer’s run of contemporary westerns, from Sicario to Wind River (2017), which led into his television westerns, and it is commonly cited among the films of the American heartland after 2008. Reach through the later television, which owes as much to the series form, is discounted.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across about ten years. The form survives whole: one version, released digitally, nothing lost and no altered cut. Presence has been continuous through a decade of streaming and television, and the film is better known now than on release, kept present partly by its writer’s later work; but it is not of the widest presence, and it is not long tested. The surface is somewhat fixed to its moment: the foreclosure signs, the reverse mortgage, the graffiti about Iraq and the bailout. They are the film’s subject rather than its fashion, and a period piece about a crisis can outlast the crisis, but a surface tied to its years is charged a little, and a decade demonstrates little.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Command of the medium is assured throughout and load-bearing in places: the opening travelling shot that lays out the world before anyone speaks; Nuttgens’s photography of light and distance; Jake Roberts’s cutting between the two cars, and the last robbery and the ridge staged with clear geography and mounting force; the spare, mournful score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The performances are the strongest department: Jeff Bridges’s Hamilton, slow, mumbling and sharp; Ben Foster’s Tanner, reckless, funny and doomed; Gil Birmingham’s patient Alberto; Chris Pine’s closed, careful Toby. The costs: the dialogue is sometimes pleased with its own folk wit, Pine is outmatched by the actors around him, the women are sketches, and the making perfects the medium’s means rather than changing them.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the old waitress at the steakhouse, asking the Rangers “What don’t you want?” in broad comedy, and Tanner dying on the ridge after killing Alberto. One law governs both: a country stripped of what it had, where the old live on habit and the young leave, and where everything is taken from someone who took it from someone else. The waitress who keeps the robbers’ tip because it pays her rent, the cowboy who says no one young will do this work, the citizens who draw on robbers, the casino and the bank all obey it. It reaches the brothers and the Rangers as pairs, and the end, where the bank’s own trust holds the land. The strain: the comedy sometimes plays as comedy alone, and the ambiguous close eases the law’s verdict.
Score: 8.4 / 10
A film of about 102 minutes holds many orders and joins them in one act. The family: two brothers, a dead mother, a dead father whose violence lies behind both, an ex-wife and two sons. The economy and labour: the bank, the reverse mortgage, oil, cattle, a waitress’s tips, closed shops. The state and the law: two Rangers, the FBI at the margins, armed citizens. History: the Comanche, the frontier, the land taken twice. The land itself, with fire and drought, and race, in the Rangers’ ribbing and the casino. The robbery, the debt and the dispossession are one act, and that is the figure’s ground. What limits it: consciousness is shown from outside, women are present as functions, the sacred hardly enters, and the whole is carried by four men on two roads.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.5, then The Inevitable and The Inner Law at 8.4. A disclosure that holds, debt as the latest form of an old dispossession, carried by image and sound as much as by speech; a lean plot whose every procedure pays, with the bank paid in its own money and its own trust holding the land; and one law, everything taken from someone who took it from someone else, from the steakhouse waitress to the ridge.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 7.4: a real turn of subject and setting, the western set in the economy after 2008, made at a modest stake in a proven genre and a classical grammar. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.5, a register perfected rather than a medium reorganised, with reach carried chiefly by its writer’s later work; and The Encompassed at 7.6, many orders joined in one act and carried by four men on two roads.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Unconcealment meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short, The Imperishable at 7.7 eight tenths short, Pressure on Tradition at 7.5 a full point short and The Swerve at 7.4 eleven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.4, below 7.5; Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 95.4, an average of 7.95 that displays 8.0, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate and the Universal Minimum, and the aggregate, a full point short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Hell or High Water as released in 2016, about 102 minutes, in its one version, from the opening shot in the bank’s car park to the porch: directed by David Mackenzie, written by Taylor Sheridan, photographed by Giles Nuttgens, edited by Jake Roberts, with music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard in May 2016 and released in the United States in August 2016 by CBS Films, with Lionsgate. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. One line of dialogue, certain in its words, is quoted; the rest, Alberto’s speech on the land among it, is described. The names of the towns, the number and order of the robberies, which of them Tanner commits alone, the state in which the casino stands, how near Hamilton stands to retirement and most lines of dialogue could not be verified and are not given; nor are the budget and the gross. The later television westerns of the film’s writer are named only as a line, and are not part of the work.