Hell or High Water
The four Oscar nominations it got wasn't enough
Directed By: David Mackenzie
Other Notable Films From Mackenzie: Starred Up
Starring: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham
Screenplay By: Taylor Sheridan
Movie Synopsis: Two brothers rob several branches of thea bank that had ensnared their mother in a predatory loan agreement.
Signature Line: “What don’t you want?”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
Everything in Hell or High Water, a neo-Western crime film about a pair of bank-robbing brothers in rural West Texas, is small by heist-movie standards.
The stakes are small (in total, the two steal just a little over $40,000), and the settings are small (the robberies all take place in struggling bank branches that rarely have more than one or two people inside), and even the characters are small (the most ostentatious person in the entire cast is an ornery old restaurant employee who’s listed in the credits as “T-Bone Waitress” and only has one scene). But curiously, all that smallness is why the movie—patient and brilliant, ambitious and aching—feels as big as it does.
A rusted out Camaro cruises through a lifeless piece of a small town, and it feels like a statement on the erosion of an Americana ideal. Two characters have a conversation about their deceased mother, and the subtext feels like a referendum on the impacts of generational trauma. A bank manager stands near a fax machine while a man with a secret gunshot wound stares at him, and the interaction feels like an indictment of the predatory practices of the country’s financial institutions.
In December of 2016, Taylor Sheridan authored an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times about how and why he wrote Hell or High Water. He ended the piece by explaining that he’d originally intended for the movie to end with a violent confrontation between the one remaining bank robber and the Texas Ranger who killed his brother: “But as the dialogue unfolded,” Sheridan wrote, “it felt fitting that [a potential] shoot-out in a modern western be interrupted by an SUV and kids coming home from school. It also felt fitting that they both get to admit their guilt without confessing, and that living with the consequences of their actions was more punishment than dying to defend them.”
The violence in Hell or High Water is small, too.
But it feels just as cataclysmic as a daylight shootout.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Scarface
1:21: I really love the Hell or High Water opening. It establishes five things:
The score—done by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis—is gonna fucking rip. (It’s all somber strings and aching keys; it sounds like desperation combined with inevitable destruction. It adds so much prestige to the movie.)
The setting—a desolate stretch of West Texas where everyone is either (a) already poor, or (b) headed toward it—is gonna fucking rip.
The direction—which opens with an 80-second one-shot take of a car driving toward a bank, and then follows that up with a 70-second oner where two masked assailants begin their attempt to rob said bank—is not only gonna be ambitious, but also, surprise, it’s gonna fucking rip.
And the movie—which somehow manages to be artistic, suspenseful, and surprisingly funny all in just its first two minutes—is gonna fucking rip.
3:01: Something neat: During their robbery, the two bank robbers run into issue after issue, prompting the teller to remark, in a wonderful country drawl, “Y’all are new at this, I’m guessing.” It’s obviously a great line—and an accidental little hat-tip to this opening scene having been the very first thing Mackenzie opted to shoot while directing the movie.
4:03: A funny bit here is that as the two guys were bumbling their way through the robbery, the employee suggested they just leave, pointing out, “All you’re guilty of right now is being stupid.” A few minutes later, as the two guys wait for the manager to arrive and open the cash deposits for them, one of the robbers turns back to her, stares at her for several seconds as she sits silently on the ground, then snipes “You’re stupid.” Sicario is my favorite Taylor Sheridan movie, but Hell or High Water is my favorite Taylor Sheridan script. He wrote the fuck out of this thing.
4:22: I wanna rob a bank so bad. I think it’s one of the five coolest things you can do, up there with surfing a giant wave and inserting a USB charger into the port on the first try.
5:01: Chris Pine and Ben Foster are here. They play Toby and Tanner, our bank robbers, the former of which (Pine) is an upstanding citizen (minus his new bank-robbing habit, I mean), and the latter of which (Foster) is an ex-con and all-around maniac perpetually at risk of boiling over.
5:02: P.S. Few people in Hollywood history have ever been as good at playing a perpetually-at-risk-of-boiling-over maniac. Foster does it in this movie, of course, but there’s also Alpha Dog (this movie is so much better than you remember it, even if you remembered loving it), and 3:10 to Yuma (my favorite western of the century, unless you consider this movie a western, in which case Yuma is my second favorite), and Hostage (I vaguely remember liking this back when I saw it the first time, but I’m not 100 percent certain), and The Mechanic (a movie situated squarely in the Pretty Okay section of Jason Statham movies), and also… (you get the point) (he does it a lot, is what I’m saying).
6:07: Bang. We’re six minutes into this movie and we’ve already gotten two bank robberies. That’s an incredibly efficient BRPM rating.
6:08: P.S. There are about 20 lines in this movie that I adore. One of my very favorites comes here, when the older white guy who happens to be in this particular bank gets a look at Toby and Tanner through their ski masks and says, “You boys robbing the bank? That’s crazy. Y’all ain’t even Mexicans.” 😂😂😂😂 The next time someone tells you they’re gonna go do something, just repeat the agenda item back to them (“You boys [WHATEVER THEY SAID THEY WERE GONNA DO]?”) and then follow it up with, “That’s crazy. Y’all ain’t even Mexicans.” Don’t give any other explanation at all. Just say it and walk away.
9:07: I mentioned in the Set It Off essay that if a movie wants to work its way into the uppermost tier of heist or robbery movies, it has to, among other things, do at least one thing that no other heist or bank robbery movie before it has done. Hell or High Water checks that box by having Toby and Tanner bury their getaway car after each robbery.
9:48: Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham are here. They play Marcus and Alberto, the two Texas Rangers now officially on the hunt for Toby and Tanner. I watched an interview Taylor Sheridan did in 2016 where he explained that he was “allergic to exposition.” The Marcus character is a great example of that. To wit, it’s easy to catch that he’s headed toward retirement because that’s pretty much the central crux of his character, but the closest we get to ever finding out that he’s being forced into retirement because of his age is when Alberto teases here, “You may get to have some fun before they send you off into the rocking chair yet.”
12:22: Okay, some backstory on Toby and Tanner’s foray into the bank-robbery biz: Their mother, who recently passed away, was tricked into signing a predatory loan by the local bank branch (Texas Midlands Bank), which sought to steal away her land after she eventually defaulted on the loan. That’s why Toby and Tanner are robbing banks now (they’re specifically robbing Texas Midlands Bank branches, with the intention of paying them back with the bank’s own money). They need just a little over $40,000 to pay off the debt, which Toby is especially keen to do because they recently found out there’s a small oil reserve on their property.
12:23: P.S. It’s very funny to me that Ben Foster’s character—an explosive and unpredictable criminal who we’ll eventually watch kill three separate guys and publicly strong-arm a sex worker just for fun—is named “Tanner.” That just doesn’t sound like the name of a maniac to me. It sounds like the name of, like, a professional fisherman, or maybe a pretty good shortstop on a little league team.
17:12: Marcus gave one of the robbery scenes a once over, talked to a few people, then surmised of the bank robbers, “They’re trying to raise a certain amount, that’s my guess. It’s gonna take a few banks to get there.” I LOVE how fast he diagnoses what’s going on. What a fun character he is. And what’s crazy is this role doesn’t even get a spot on the JEFF BRIDGES COOL MOVIE CHARACTERS podium. (That’d be occupied by The Dude from The Big Lebowski, Jack Lucas from The Fisher King, and Rooster Cogburn from True Grit.)
18:56: Right here’s where we get the most moving part of the movie (and also the single best Tanner moment). Toby and Tanner are eating lunch and discussing the different ways that Toby’s bank-robbing plans could pan out. Toby, who has never committed a crime, is hopeful that things will work out for the best. Tanner, who has been in and out of prison for years, has a more pessimistic (realistic?) outlook. And those two worldviews clashing leads to this conversation:
