Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016)

Jeff Bridges, Margaret Bowman, and Gil Birmingham in Hell or High Water

Marcus Hamilton: Jeff Bridges
Toby Howard: Chris Pine
Tanner Howard: Ben Foster
Alberto Parker: Gil Birmingham
Elsie: Dale Dickey
Debbie Howard: Marin Ireland
Jenny Ann: Katy Mixon
Justin Howard: John Paul Howard
T-Bone Waitress: Margaret Bowman

Director: David Mackenzie
Screenplay: Taylor Sheridan
Cinematography: Giles Nuttgens
Production design: Tom Duffield
Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis

Hell or High Water has a resonance in Trumpian America, with its portrayal of a kind of rural desperation that echoes the era of Bonnie and Clyde, when robbing banks was seen as a kind of stick-it-to-the-man activity, a way of getting back at an economic system that allowed no other way of breaking a cycle. As Toby Howard puts it, "I've been poor my whole life, like a disease passing from generation to generation." Toby enlists his ex-con brother, Tanner, in a scheme to rob the small-town branches of the fictional Texas Midland Bank to build up enough cash to pay off the reverse mortgage that threatens the foreclosure of their recently dead mother's ranch, and then to put the property in trust -- with the same bank -- as a guarantee of a better future for Toby's sons. He is, in short, buying off the bank with the bank's money. Given that the Howard brothers have nothing to lose, it's a risk they think worth taking. On the other hand, there is the law to contend with, in the form of Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton, just days away from a retirement he dreads. Hamilton, too, has nothing to lose, which means he doesn't mind dragging along his partner, Alberto Parker, on an pursuit that Parker thinks is absurd. It's a film of beautiful performances, not only another laurel for Jeff Bridges, but also a potential career-maker for Ben Foster and a chance for Chris Pine to show that he's not just another pretty face -- he grunges up well. The West Texas setting -- though the film was shot just across the border in eastern New Mexico -- is exploited skillfully, with deft touches like the frequent billboards advertising ways to get out of debt and the moribund small towns that cause Parker to ask, "Do you want to live here? Got an old hardware store that charges twice what Home Depot does, one restaurant with a rattlesnake for a waitress." The film also plays on the Texan love of guns when the robbers discover that the patrons of the banks are taking full advantage of the state's concealed-carry laws. Hamilton also echoes the region's casual racism, perhaps ironically, with his digs at his partner's American Indian heritage, though the point is made without irony when an old man is surprised that the robbers "ain't Mexican." Hell or High Water perhaps doesn't reach the elegiac heights of No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007, but in its simpler, less florid way it's an equally worth companion in the neo-Western genre.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Both the title and the film are overlong, but it's hard to see how either of them could have been trimmed. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a lingering, subtle meditation on the nature of celebrity set in an era long before the arrival of social media thrust celebrities like Donald Trump into our daily lives. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck give memorable performances in their respective title roles -- Affleck received a supporting actor Oscar nomination, although his role is surely larger than Pitt's -- and they're well supported by Sam Shepard as Frank James, Mary-Louise Parker in the thankless role of Jesse's wife, Sam Rockwell as Robert Ford's brother Charley, and Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, and Paul Schneider as various ill-fated members of the James gang. There's also a cameo by former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville as the governor of Missouri who precipitates the assassination. It was only the second feature directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik, who wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Ron Hansen. There's a bit too much lyric profundity in the screenplay, as in the voiceover by the narrator (Hugh Ross), who tells us about Jesse James: "Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified." That's a hard description for any actor to live up to, but Pitt does a good job of it in perhaps the best performance of his career. Since the title pretty much gives the plot away, the film wisely concentrates on exploring the characters of James and Ford, who meet when the latter joins the James gang for a train robbery in Blue Cut, Missouri. Ford has worshiped James since boyhood, and in one splendid scene James taunts and teases him into revealing the depths of his infatuation. Ford has memorized everything that could possibly link him to James: They both have brothers whose names contain six letters, for example. This is homoerotic hero-worship at its most intense -- and eventually, most deadly. The movie was filmed in Canada, with superb, Oscar-nominated cinematography by Roger Deakins. The score is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Cave himself plays the saloon singer who taunts Ford with "The Ballad of Jesse James," which refers to "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard" (James's pseudonym).

Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)

Angels are usually a tiresome element in movies. I loathe the stickiness of the way they're conceived in movies like It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), and even actors of the caliber of Cary Grant and Denzel Washington can't do much with playing them in films like The Bishop's Wife (Henry Koster, 1947) and its remake, The Preacher's Wife (Penny Marshall, 1996). Maybe it's because I subscribe to Rilke's dictum, Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich -- every angel is terrible. Only a filmmaker of genius like Wim Wenders can transcend the essential cheesiness of their presence in a plot -- a cheesiness that lingers in the American remake of Wings of Desire, City of Angels (Brad Silberberg, 1988). The idea that there are angels watching over our lives, reading our thoughts, but unseen except by other angels and sometimes by children, is not a very original one. But what distinguishes the working out of this idea by Wenders and scenarists Peter Handke and Richard Reitlinger is the empathetic approach to them as beings who have been around since Creation, watching the course of humankind and unable to alter it, and occasionally so moved by what they see that they choose to give up immortality and become human. And that these angels have a specific territory to cover, in this case the city of Berlin, a nexus of human cruelty and human suffering. Even so, the concept could easily slip into banality without the blend of humor and melancholy that Wenders brings to it, without performers of the caliber of Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander as the angels Damiel and Cassiel, and without the poetic cinematography of Henri Alekan. It was also an inspired choice to cast Peter Falk as himself, an actor shooting a movie set in the Nazi era who is often stopped on the Berlin streets by people who know him as Columbo, the detective he played on television. It's also a witty touch to have Falk turn out to be an ex-angel, able to sense but not see the presence of Damiel and Cassiel. In many ways, however, the real star of the film is the city of Berlin itself -- although Wenders was prevented from shooting in the eastern sector of the city, he uses the Wall as a kind of correlative to the division between angels and humans. Almost everything works in the film, including the shifts from monochrome (the angels' point of view) to color (the humans'), the shabby little bankrupt circus whose star (Solveig Dommartin) Damiel literally falls for, and the score by Jürgen Knieper. I'm not hip enough to appreciate Nick Cave's songs, but their melancholy eccentricity is an essential part of the texture of the film.