Hell or High Water

After Oscar season, I usually find myself playing catch-up, trying to see some of the acclaimed and nominated films that I missed in theaters. This week, I finally had a chance to see Hell or High Water, the elegiac western noir starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Jeff Bridges. 

 

One convention of film noir is the ambiguous protagonist. Film noir leading characters are never outright heroes nor are they always straight-up villains. They’re usually morally ambiguous people who are a combination of selfishness and greed along with a warped but strong personal code. They’re usually driven by something like greed or revenge but they also have their own sense of wrong or right.  This is absolutely true of Hell or High Water, the story of Toby and Tanner Howard, two Texan brothers whose mother died of a long, lingering illness and left their ranch on the verge of belonging to the unscrupulous Texas Midlands Bank.

Chris Pine plays Toby, the divorced father of two who has always tried to stay on the straight and narrow. Ben Foster is Tanner, the unpredictable, violent brother who has been in and out of prison for years and, as it is revealed, shot and killed their abusive father. Toby is the respectable, law-abiding one and he’s also the smart brother, so he is the one who figures out how to rob several Texas Midlands branches to pay off the debt on the ranch that’s owed to the bank. Toby knows that it’s wrong to hold people at gunpoint and steal money, but in his mind, it is more wrong for a bank to loan money to a dying woman who everyone knew could never pay it back. He isn’t stealing for personal gain, the thrill, or the glory. He’s stealing because he feels the system is rigged against people like him, his mother, and his brother. It’s a bleak crime thriller very much for our times.

Jeff Bridges plays Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton who, along with his partner Alberto Parker is on the brothers’ trail. One subtle but powerful theme throughout the film is brotherhood. We see Toby and Tanner’s familiarity and brusque macho love for each other and we see Marcus and Alberto’s antagonistic, tired tolerance for one another throughout the film. Each pair of men show their affection and devotion to one another in radically different ways, often in ways that don’t seem much like love at all. But for anyone who has brothers, it seems perfectly appropriate.

Marcus and Alberto’s relationship is particularly interesting in that Marcus is casually racist and insulting about Alberto’s Native heritage, and his partner seems like he can barely wait for the older man to retire and leave him alone. But late in the film when Alberto is shot by one of the Howard brothers, Marcus’s grief is palpable and real. It’s the part of his performance that earned Jeff Bridges the Oscar nomination he received, no doubt.

Another convention of film noir is the ambiguous ending. There are rarely, if ever, happy endings in noirs and Hell or High Water is no different. Toby and Marcus face off at the Howard family ranch. Both men have lost loved ones over the course of the film, both are weary but clear eyed about their place in the world and where they stand with one another. Rather than going with the easy Hollywood shootout or the equally easy, let-‘em-off-the-hook unambiguous happy ending, the film’s conclusion leaves the fate of the one remaining Howard brother and the now retired Texas lawman up in the air, the conclusion suspended in the tension between them.

The film shows the financial decay of some of the open, rural spaces in the American west and the personal, inner decay that can happen because of it. There are no heroes in Hell or High Water, but it does suggest that there’s a larger, villainous system at work that can push good people to go bad.