9 / 10
Robbing the Bank That’s Robbing You
Toby and Tanner Howard rob banks. They hit small branches of the Texas Midland Bank early in the morning, taking only loose cash from the drawers, no stacks with dye packs, and they disappear down empty roads. Toby, played by Chris Pine, is the planner, quiet and careful. Tanner, played by Ben Foster, is his older brother, a volatile ex-con who enjoys it far too much.
The reason emerges slowly. Their mother has just died, and her ranch, the only thing the family owns, is about to be foreclosed on by the very bank they’re robbing, under a reverse mortgage. Oil has recently been found on the land. That makes the ranch worth fighting for. Toby wants to pay off the debt with the bank’s own money, put the ranch in a trust for his sons and break the cycle of poverty that’s trapped his family for generations.
David Mackenzie directed it in 2016, from a script by Taylor Sheridan, who’d written Sicario, and the decade produced few better American films.
This one got under my skin. It’s angry in a way I find bracing, furious at the banks and tender toward almost everybody else, and I think it’s the best of Sheridan’s frontier trilogy by a clear distance. My biggest reservation is how little the women get to do, and that’s most of the gap between this and a 10.
For Writers
The brothers rob the bank that’s foreclosing on their family ranch. The crime has a motive that makes the audience sympathize with the criminals.
Giving your antagonists, or your law-breaking protagonists, a motive the reader understands transforms a crime story. The reader stops rooting for the law and starts wondering who’s really in the wrong.
The key is specificity. Toby isn’t robbing banks for greed or thrills. He’s robbing the specific bank that’s about to take his family’s specific land, using a reverse mortgage the reader can understand. The details make the injustice real, and the sympathy follows. A vague grievance earns a shrug. A specific one, with a document and a deadline, earns the reader’s loyalty.
A Dying Country
The film’s setting is its real subject. West Texas, as Mackenzie shows it, is a landscape of boarded-up towns, empty main streets, debt-relief billboards, reverse-mortgage adverts and signs saying fast cash for your land. Everybody’s broke, and everybody’s tired. The banks are the only businesses doing well, and everybody knows who the enemy is.
The robberies play almost as a kind of rough justice. When Toby and Tanner hit a bank, the locals barely seem upset. One witness at a diner says the bank has been robbing him for thirty years. The film never lectures about economics. It simply shows a way of life being squeezed to death, and lets you draw your own conclusions.
Pine and Foster
Chris Pine gives the best performance of his career as Toby, a divorced father who’s never had anything and is determined his sons will. He’s quiet, tired and deeply decent, a man who’s broken the law for the only reason he can think of, and Pine plays him with a stillness that’s completely unlike his Star Trek swagger.
Ben Foster is terrifying and funny as Tanner, a man who’s been in prison, killed his abusive father and knows he’s not built for ordinary life. He robs banks because he loves it, and because he loves his little brother. His recklessness keeps putting the plan in danger, and his loyalty keeps saving it. The brothers’ relationship, full of teasing, anger and deep affection, holds the film together.
There’s a lovely scene where they wrestle in the dirt outside their mother’s house like children, laughing and cursing. It tells you everything about who they are to each other, and it’s the scene I’d show anybody who doubts Pine and Foster as brothers. I believe every shove.
Bridges and Birmingham
Jeff Bridges plays Marcus Hamilton, a Texas Ranger a few weeks from retirement, who takes the case because it gives him something to do. He’s slow, shrewd and relentlessly rude to his partner, Alberto Parker, played by Gil Birmingham, who’s half Comanche and half Mexican and the target of an endless stream of Marcus’s jokes about his heritage.
Their banter is very funny and uncomfortable, and underneath it, the two men clearly love each other. Birmingham is quietly wonderful, taking the jokes, giving some back and making a pointed observation about the land: a century and a half ago, it belonged to his ancestors, until white settlers took it. Now the banks are taking it from the settlers’ descendants.
Bridges earned an Oscar nomination, and he’s a pleasure to watch: mumbling, sly and sharper than he looks. His Hamilton is a lonely man who’s afraid of retirement, and the case gives him a reason to keep going. I’d happily sit through a whole film of him and Birmingham needling each other in a parked car.
For Writers
Marcus mocks Alberto relentlessly, and underneath the jokes, the two men love each other deeply. Teasing becomes their private language of affection.
Characters who show affection through insults and banter can feel far more real than ones who state their feelings outright, the way people rarely do. The reader reads the warmth between the lines, and it’s all the more moving for never being spoken aloud.
When one of them is killed, the absence of the banter tells the reader everything about the loss. Sheridan doesn’t give Marcus a speech of grief. He just gives him silence where the jokes used to be, and the silence says more than any eulogy could. My article on writing dialogue that works goes further.
The Waitress
Some of the film’s best moments are small. At a diner, an elderly waitress, played by Margaret Bowman, takes the rangers’ order by telling them there’s only one thing on the menu, and asks what they don’t want. It’s hilarious, the kind of scene that makes a place feel real.
Another waitress, played by Katy Mixon, receives a huge tip from Toby, in stolen cash, and refuses to give it back to the rangers because she needs it for her mortgage. The whole film, in one exchange: everyone’s broke, everyone needs the money and nobody’s on the bank’s side.
The Last Robbery
The final robbery goes wrong. The brothers hit a bank in a busier town, armed locals open fire and a chase begins. Tanner, drawing the pursuit away from Toby, drives into the hills and holes up on a ridge with a rifle, shooting at the posse below.
It’s a tense, sad sequence, a modern last stand, and it ends with a sudden, shocking death on the rangers’ side and Tanner’s own death at the hands of a patient old marksman. Foster plays Tanner’s final moments with a kind of joyful defiance. He’s going out on his own terms, and he’s buying his brother’s escape.
Tanner’s last stand is where the film breaks my heart. Foster turns a lunatic on a ridge into the most loving brother in the picture, and I didn’t want him gone even though the story needed him to go.
The Porch
It all ends with a quiet confrontation. Months later, the retired Hamilton drives out to the ranch, where Toby has paid off the mortgage and set up the trust. The two men sit on the porch and talk. Hamilton knows Toby planned the robberies. Toby knows he knows. There’s no evidence, and the money’s clean.
The scene is tense, full of unspoken threat and grief, and it ends without resolution, with Hamilton suggesting they’ll finish it another day. That porch is the reason this rates a 9. Two men trade words where a lesser western would trade bullets, and I’d take that conversation over any shootout the genre has given me. It leaves you thinking about justice, loss and who the real thieves are.
For Writers
Hell or High Water ends with a conversation on a porch, with no gunfight at all. The final showdown is between two men who both know the truth.
A climax doesn’t always need action, however much the genre seems to demand it. A tense conversation between two characters who understand each other perfectly, and can’t say what they know, can be more gripping than any shootout.
Sheridan leaves the ending unresolved, with the promise of another day. An open ending works when the reader has everything they need to imagine what comes next, and the characters have said everything except the thing that matters. The reader walks away still sitting on that porch.
Sheridan’s Script
Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay is superb, lean, funny and full of sharp, lived-in dialogue. The film is the middle part of what he’s called his frontier trilogy, between Sicario and Wind River, and it’s the best of the three. Sheridan went on to create Yellowstone, and you can see the seeds of it here: the land, the debt and the fight to hold on.
The script was nominated for an Oscar, along with the film, Bridges and the editing. It lost to Moonlight in a very strong year.
Music and Light
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis wrote the score, a mournful, droning mix of guitars and strings, and the soundtrack brims with country songs about hard times. Giles Nuttgens’s cinematography captures the flat, empty beauty of the landscape, shot in New Mexico standing in for West Texas.
The film is only about an hour and forty minutes long, and it doesn’t waste a scene.
The Casino
Toby’s plan has a clever final step. The brothers can’t deposit stolen cash, so they drive across the border to a Native American casino in Oklahoma, buy chips, play a little and cash out, walking away with clean money in the form of a cheque made out to them by the casino. Then they pay the bank with its own money.
The detail is lovely, and it proves how carefully Toby thought everything through. Tanner, of course, nearly wrecks it by picking a fight with a Comanche gambler at the poker table, and the gambler’s sharp line about who the Comanche once were lands beautifully.
An Outsider’s Eye
David Mackenzie is Scottish, and he’d made tough British films like Starred Up before coming to America. Perhaps that’s why Hell or High Water sees Texas so clearly. He’s fascinated by the place without romanticizing it: the heat, the guns, the pickup trucks, the empty diners and the sense of a way of life running out of road.
He also knows when to hold back. Much of the film is quiet, just men driving, talking and waiting, and the silences are as important as the shootouts.
Any Flaws?
It’s hard to find many. The romance is non-existent, the female characters are mostly waitresses and bank tellers and some viewers may find Marcus’s jokes about Alberto hard to sit through, even if the film clearly intends them as a mark of affection.
None of that changes the verdict. Hell or High Water is a near-perfect film, a crime story that’s really about America, and one of the best westerns of the century.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Hell or High Water is a crime story whose real subject is economic ruin. The robberies, the chase and the showdown all serve a portrait of a place and people being squeezed to death.
The best genre stories use their familiar shapes to say something about the world their characters live in.
Ask what your genre story is really about, underneath the plot, and let the setting carry that meaning.
Who the Real Thieves Are
Hell or High Water is a 9. It’s lean, funny and furious, with Pine and Foster as brothers robbing the bank that’s robbing them and Bridges and Birmingham on their trail. It loses a point from me because the women are all waitresses and tellers, and a few of Marcus’s jokes are rough going even when I know what they mean. Everything else is as good as the modern western gets, and that porch scene will stay with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists
