It's an super little movie; the performances are great and the dialogue is natural and often hilarious. Jeff Bridges at first appears to be going a little hard for a tobacco-chewing caricature of a Texas Ranger but he ends up a much more complex character than that. His reaction to his partners death, and then when he gets his subsequent revenge, is astonishingly good.
Similarly Ben Foster's Tanner is exceptionally well drawn. At first sight a familiar thuggish good ol' boy with a rakish charm, a tendency to sudden violence, and poor impulse control - he lends the movie the same sort of nervous energy that Joe Pesci gave Goodfellas; but Tanner is not the cartoonish villain that Tommy DeVito was: he understands his own failings and understands he is martyring himself for his brother. He is motivated and determined throughout; in the end it is Tanner's superior grasp of the situation, and superior commitment to his brother's plan, which sees that plan through.
Chris Pine's Toby I have some issues with, but I will come to that. What I want to talk about is how it achieves a sense of place.
Achieving a sense of place is interesting. I remember reading an interview with Nick Hornby where he proclaimed himself baffled at readers complementing him on evoking North London so well in High Fidelity when he only ever named it, never actually described it. I haven't actually read it but I'm willing to believe Nick never mentions halal butchers, or hasidic jews, or the particular aroma I remember nineties North London acquiring on hot days; but I'll bet all his characters go everywhere by tube, and live in flats converted from pre-war housing, and think nothing of having a takeaway and off-license at the bottom of the street. If you know a place you describe it without trying to. As Borges said:
...if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, [the] absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work
There is no doubt that Hell And High Water is about Texas, not just set there. Indeed the writer says as much in an interview. And despite apparently not a scene being shot there, it evokes an idea of Texas very strongly. There are three reasons why:
Firstly, it's in the photography. I've never set foot in West Texas but everything I expect is there: the flat grassland, featureless as far as the eye can see; the brooding skies; the hot empty streets of small towns; the long empty roads; the hard quality to the light.
Secondly, and more importantly, the location is vital to the plot. The motivating factor for the brothers is the age-old trope of a rancher striking oil, albeit with the modern hitch of a reverse mortgage to overcome. The brother's plan relies on a surfeit of small, near empty towns, each with one small bank branch. The stumbling block at the start of the third act only exists because of the great distances between those towns. In the finale the brothers are initially being chased not be the police but by armed citizens.
If there is a weakness in the story it is that it hangs off the simplistic notion of banks are bad, mmm'kay, but this plays into the idea of Texas too. At no point does the movie question why the Howard's mother had to go to the equity release market to fund her care. Set anywhere else it would be a film about the failings of the state rather than the rapaciousness of banks, but on the old American frontier that question never seems relevant.
Thirdly it is about the characters. The bit parts, from the sassy waitress to the other even sassier waitress, to the old boys in the diner, to everyone in the banks, stand out not just for their many, many great lines of dialogue, but because they are all, to a man and woman, fiercely strong willed and independent minded. Maybe this is a caricature but it is a relevant caricature, one that plays in to the sense of place and the overall theme of the film.
Here is where I have an issue with the character of Toby. This is a movie about masculinity (how could it be a movie about Texas and not be about masculinity), and to an extent that justifies the lack of women, but we are asked to believe that Toby has spent the last year or so tending to his dying mother, a profoundly feminine role. Do macho young Texas men put up with wiping their mother's backsides? I guess -like everybody- they do if they have to, but it's working against type.
More problematically, his plan at the end was entirely about his estranged wife and kids. The closing scene finds him doing up the ranch with seemingly no ambition whatsoever for himself. He is not attempting to get back together with his wife. As far as we know he is not even attempting to be part of his sons lives again. He is so selfless as to be nihilistic. He is such a well drawn and well played character during the movie, that the unlikelihood of his life before it starts and after it ends jars hard.
This was not unsolvable either. A much more likely backstory was that the reverse mortgage funded a Mexican nurse to help look after his mother. Toby and her could have fallen in love (not an unknown story). He could be planning a calm, homely, quiet life with her when everything was over.
This would not mean a happy ending of course, or what would he have sacrificed? Ultimately you would still have to keep the hint of a final, later, suicide-by-cop in order to revenge his brother. He is not a man who could let that go. But it would become a tragedy rather than nihilism.
I guess a happy ending just wouldn't be Texas.
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