Hell or High Water (2016)

Official trailer

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 the very bank they’re robbing is about to foreclose on her ranch, the only thing the family owns, 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.

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 ads 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 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.

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.

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. Moonlight took Best Picture and Manchester by the Sea took the screenplay award 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 check 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 drawn to 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 among the best westerns of the century.

Craft Note

Who the Real Thieves Are

I give Hell or High Water 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.

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