The acclaimed modern-day western Hell or High Water may pivot on a conflict between disenfranchised brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster), Texas law men (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) and the corporate Man-at-large. However, it’s driven less by traditional action theatrics than by people sitting, surveying their space, drinking in their perverted, disappointing patch of Americana. The film is self-consciously mythic, and that’s why it’s poignant: it wants to be a great and timely western. Watching Hell or High Water, it’s hard not to think of The Last Picture Show, which featured a younger Bridges on the other side of his career, and which was similarly eager to conjure the iconography of an America thought to be long gone – a so-called “purer” America, perhaps.
Hell or High Water is unusually engaging because it lingeringly allows us to regard protagonists and antagonists alike as the actors stew in their characters’ regret, exuding cinematic charisma. Bridges is a legend, though this film inspires us to take that legend-hood less for granted, as he’s getting on in years. Pine grows fully into his hunkiness for the first time, revealing inner mournfulness that proves there’s professional life for him after he escapes the straitjacket of Captain Kirk. Foster informs his schtick-acting with pathos, and Birmingham quietly steals the movie as a biracial Native American/Mexican navigating an insane Caucasian world.
The film involves two mirroring pairs – robbers and cops – and a confidently streamlined structure, alternating between the pairs as they banter through violent and comic chaos. It’s the humor that keeps the film from turning into warmed-over Cormac McCarthy; at its heart, it knows that its tormented man’s kabuki is a little silly. The exhilaration of Hell or High Water depends partially on contrast: it’s a late-summer film that actually relies on acting and direction. Director David Mackenzie doesn’t lean on an impersonally huge scale as a crutch. The sight of Bridges with his booted feet propped up on a dusty fire extinguisher is more thrilling than frenetically edited images of, say, 50 superheroes flying about, with occasional cutaways to the visages of the famous actors ostensibly playing them, or of this weekend’s computer-animated mass apocalypse du jour.
Don’t Breathe revels in similarly unexpected competency. There are few genres less respected than horror films aimed at the youth market, but director Fede Alvarez shares Mackenzie’s pride in meat-and-potatoes craftsmanship. The story is nearly as oft-told as the one governing Hell or High Water: a home is invaded, and cat-and-mouse negotiations arise between the owner and the interlopers in fashions that most obviously recall Wait Until Dark and Panic Room. The twist is that our sympathies are aligned with the interlopers, as the home’s owner is an ageing blind loner, played by Stephen Lang, who is revealed to be a common enough kind of bogeyman: the insane war veteran. The Vietnam war was good to the American horror movie once upon a time, and the endless chain of nesting wars in the Middle East is paying the genre similar dividends.
Don’t Breathe and Hell or High Water have a number of things in common. They dramatize an entire country’s collective anxiety – over stagnant wages, disappearing homes, racism, classism – through the sight of a few people standing in the frame at any given time, following actors as they reconfigure into various groupings with poetic precision. The dilapidated Detroit of Don’t Breathe, borrowed from Candyman and It Follows, serves the same purpose as the hopeless Texan vistas of Hell or High Water: they are the hells our desperate antiheroes wish to escape, and standing between them and their qualified, bare-minimum dreams are ageing boomers.
These films remind us that one is a more dramatic figurative number than 1,000,000. Or that a handful of characters can register more vividly than dozens. A small number is intimate; a large number is often vague. This is why the story of the murder of a single human being can be more dramatic than the reporting of a massacre; it’s why a controversy over emails can damage a presidential candidate, while their opponent remains unscathed by a head-spinning onslaught of hourly atrocities that serve to cancel themselves out.
But will Hollywood learn this truth, and does it need to? There were a great number of bombs this summer that embodied the usual more-is-much-less remake/sequel fever, but Marvel and Disney films continue to pay dividends that embarrass the impressive yet modest success of Hell or High Water and Don’t Breathe, plus Bad Moms, Lights Out and The Shallows in the eyes of studio executives. Chasing Marvel dollars, studios are embracing increasingly vast, obliging, inelegantly bloated narrative models that resolutely fail to marvel. One often exits a contemporary blockbuster in a numbed, sugar-addled blur. Hell or High Water and Don’t Breathe reconnect one with the primal conventional pleasures of mainstream adult cinemagoing. They eat like a meal.
