The Mastermind

“The Mastermind” begins with a point-of-view shot looking out from a painting at an art gallery in Framingham, Massachusetts that is being inspected by J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor). If it would seem to embody the whole point of the visual arts in the first place, to seek wonder and a deeper meaning of life by seeing something from a different perspective, well, that is not quite what’s happening with art school dropout J.B. As he peruses the paintings, writer/director Kelly Reichardt gradually reveals him not to be a connoisseur of art, so much, as a thief. With a conspicuously snoozing security guard in one gallery, J.B. opens a case and pilfers a toy soldier figurine, using his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two young sons as cover in an easygoing getaway. This is not a one-off, however, but a test run as we see when he gathers “the guys” in his basement and to break down his quasi-masterplan for a much bigger heist of four works by the abstract painter Arthur Dove.

J.B. emits as supercilious air in this planning session as he does in a deft dinner table scene with his wife, mother Sarah (Hope Davis), and father (Bill Camp), the latter referencing an old acquaintance of his son who has done well by owning a company, wondering what he knows that J.B. doesn’t. J.B. responds that balancing books is an idiotic use of one’s time. Set in 1970, “The Mastermind” is perched on that precipice of 60s counterculture burning out, and that is how O’Connor plays this moment and all the others too, depleted of spirit, just sort of wearily existing within the confines of a mainstream culture. In just a few flourishes, Reichardt evokes Terri as the family glue, making dinner, paying the bills, ferrying the kids to school, the latter conveyed in a shot that strands J.B. watching them in the garage with the morning paper, standing there like an alien in his own life. In one profound moment of anti-profundity, after he has stolen the paintings, J.B. hangs one of them on his own wall, momentarily turning his home into an art gallery, observing it, as if attempting to interpret his own reason for this illegal act and coming up empty.

Like most of “The Mastermind,” the heist itself is overlaid with a cool, jazzy score functioning as dissonant mockery of the events onscreen. Nothing with the heist quite goes the way that J.B. has planned, from his kids unexpectedly having the day off from school to the latch on the back window of the car that takes way too long to undo, though the funniest detail, in fact, is that despite so much going wrong, the small crew still pulls it off, and that it only falls apart due to an event that takes place offscreen, drolly underscoring J.B.’s inability to account for everything. Indeed, when the local news files a report on the robbery, J.B.’s unsuspecting father notes that he’s not sure this heist was completely thought through, an unwitting admonishment of his son that stings more than the detectives who show up to finger J.B. as the quote-unquote mastermind.  

Christopher Blauvel’s cinematography evokes the faded, under-saturated look of the movies of the 70s, though is not in service of cheap nostalgia but to remind us of the era’s mood and to reflect the main character’s wan headspace. Indeed, as J.B. becomes fugitive, rather than the energy or pace picking up, the already leisurely “The Mastermind” slows down even more, and rather than effusing regret or even resignation, O’Connor effuses, well, nothing much at all, as if the world itself were an abstract concept. Throughout, Reichardt infuses news reports of the Vietnam War and shows protests in response to it, none of which leave an impression on J.B., and essentially cast his slow motion flee from justice not quite as dropping out of society, like the two friends (Gaby Hoffmann and John Magaro) with whom he briefly hides out have, but quiet quitting society instead. Yet society gets the last laugh with a denouement that would have worked as a silent comedy, ensnaring an unsuspecting J.B., punctuated by one last shot that is like the bleakest Looney Tune you have ever seen. Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!  

Certain Women

“Certain Women”, based on short stories by Maile Meloy, features three different vignettes with three different women. Characters from each vignette occasionally cross paths with others, but director Kelly Reichardt, who adapted the screenplay, mostly ties these tales together via the main characters’ similarly stifled emotions and lives they struggle to wrest joy and meaning from. You see that immediately in the first scene, where Laura (Laura Dern) and Ryan (James Legros) are currently in the midst of an illicit rendezvous, given the mid-afternoon motel location, as she rubs her socked foot against Ryan’s back. This act, however, exudes less passion than quiet pay-attention-to-me desperation. He doesn’t pay much attention. They talk about the color of her sweater. God, that’s so Reichardt.

Another movie might have employed this affair as an inciting incident, but it’s quickly brushed past as Ryan breaks their relationship off in barely so many words before Laura’s own narrative is essentially co-opted by a different male, Fuller (Jared Harris), a client who keeps showing up at Laura’s law firm. Nominally he yearns to sue for workplace injury, but just as much he is looking for someone to talk to, though he never really listens to what she has to say in return. Indeed, though she has repeatedly told him he can’t sue because he accepted a settlement, Fuller only takes this as a gospel upon hearing it from a male judge.

Eventually, Fuller returns to his old workplace and takes a hostage, and Laura is enlisted to try and talk him down. These moments are played less for tension, however, than drollness, like Laura is a mother forced to clean up an angry adult toddler’s mess. And the seeming confrontation ends limply, and this story intentionally ends without any real sense of who Laura is because she is forced for the duration of the episode to set herself aside, to keep everything she feels in, to give this guy a shoulder to cry on, which she does, nearly literally, in a scene as comical as it is sad when he breaks down sobbing in her car that is set to a Guy Clark song about usurping the sameness of things which you sense in Laura’s quiet weariness is what she so terribly yearns to do.

In the second story we return to Ryan, though the tale truly belongs to Gina (Michelle Williams), his wife. Ryan does not co-opt his spouse’s story, however, so much as exist outside of it, emblemized in the opening moments where she has a covert cigarette on a walk in the woods, and then walks in on Ryan sharing a joke with their daughter (Sara Rodier) that Gina doesn’t get. These moments demonstrate a fissure in this family, as does a simple if nevertheless striking image where Gina and Ryan sit vacantly in the front seat of their truck while their daughter sits in back, tuned out to her iPod.

Gina has apparently decided the solution to this family crisis is to symbolically rebuild their familial foundation by erecting a new family home in a pristine spot of wilderness. To do so, however, she wants to acquire a pile of sandstone that an old man they know, Albert (René Auberjonois), has sitting unused in his yard, and so Gina and Ryan stop by Albert’s for a folksy negotiation. This scene, in which the senile Albert can’t quite stay on topic, drifts from his ingrained attitude toward addressing the male more than the female to his lament that he and his brother intended to use that sandstone to build a deck. The latter never happened, so sure, Gina and Ryan can have it, but in the ensuing sequence where they come to pick the sandstone up, the old man watching from a window leaves you wondering if he’s heartbroken to see it go, heartbroken to see it go to a woman, or if he knows that it can’t fill the void like she hopes. It’s classic Reichardt Ambiguity, or maybe it’s just all three at once.

The ultimate passage is less abstruse, if even more minimalist, where an isolated rancher (Lily Gladstone) is so lonely she wanders one night into a class about school law, a topic which bears no meaning for her, just because it promises a little company. That company winds up being the instructor, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart), a put out, stressed out lawyer from Livingston who makes the 4 hour trek, each way. After class they visit the local diner, where Beth orders food she never seems to finish while the rancher, who is never named, mostly just sits on the other side with a glass of water, replying to whatever question Beth absent-mindedly thinks to pose. This story is comprised of three classes and three meals, until Beth doesn’t show and the Rancher gets in her car with nary a word and drives to Livingston.

This is something like Big Sky neorealism, where Gladstone gives a humongous performance in the smallest of ways, simply allowing her shy manner, whether by smiles that come across as sad as polite, or a vocal delivery evoking someone who hasn’t been around anyone for long stretches of time, to pull you in. Stewart, meanwhile, is the perfect partner, not cold but so distracted that she remains oblivious to the romantic pull she has on her new sorta friend, even to the end, when suddenly the Rancher is there in the parking lot of her law firm.

This, like everything else, is a passage Reichardt handles with a wrenching undemonstrativeness. If it is impulsive, even passionate move, it plays more of muted innocence, like in the night before the Rancher tracks down Beth where she wanders the streets of Livingston, reminiscent of a big kid who has unexpectedly wound up at Disneyland. And when she does see Beth, a lifetime of not really having any words to say, which is what Gladstone’s entire performance delicately sculpts, comes to bear, and she doesn’t know how to communicate the way she feels. It’s not that Beth rejects her, because Stewart doesn’t even really let Beth reject her, just standing there more in early morning, confusedly squinting, uncaffeinated mystification more than anything. Gladstone lets the Rancher feel rejection anyway, like she expected it, and when she gets back in her truck to commence the long drive back all we are left with is Gladstone’s face.

Gladstone’s face becomes the biggest thing in the movie. With each successive story, the more Reichardt chips away at narrative conventions, until, by these last frames, all that’s really left are emotions splayed across one person’s face.

River of Grass

River of Grass is the nickname for Florida’s expansive wetlands, the Everglades, long thought uninhabitable, as Cozy (Lisa Bowman) explains in an early voiceover, though this has since changed, invaded by freeways and strip malls, this ode to the natural world overrun by the machines of man. Latter day auteur Kelly Reichardt, for whom “River of Grass” served as an auspicious feature film debut in 1994, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the less-caffeinated version of Sundance, might have made that observation her focal point. She is a director who favors stillness in her frames and nature in her themes. “River of Grass” is still interested in landscapes, but they are less about wildlife than the ones trying to run out nature, the shabby environment of southern Florida, where it is principally set, where homes look like shantys, motels looks like shacks. And whereas her films often revel in, or draw fear from, silence, here the soundtrack is piled high with jazz drum solos, all of which seem to resemble the noise occupying a place in the mind of Cozy, a mother not devoted to her daughter and not in love with her husband, and whose dreary stay-at-home life is slowly winding its way toward absolutely nothing.

Latter day Reichardt is also not a noted humorist, preferring solemn observations, which doesn’t mean she’s tedious but that she opts for serious observations about matters near and dear to her heart. “River of Grass”, however, is funny, really funny, albeit darkly funny, with a twisted and bleak viewpoint of the world. After all, it’s jumping off point is a hilariously dry scene in which a detective, Ryder (Dick Russell), loses his gun in the midst of a chase. Not knowing, however, where or when it went missing, he scours his house for it like he’s lost his jacket. He never finds it. Lee Ray Harold (Larry Fessenden), however, who looks like Timothy Olyphant if Timothy Olyphant was a south Florida vampire, does find it. He lives at home with his grandmother. He has no job. He has nothing to do. He takes the gun to a bar and meets Cozy who, as it happens, has just walked out on her child and husband without telling them.

Turns out that Ryder is Cozy’s dad, which means that his gun is with his daughter, though she doesn’t know it and he doesn’t know it, which sounds like the set-up to another joke. But the punchline isn’t what you expect, because “River of Grass” roundly refuses to make a big deal out this development, treating it merely as meaningless coincidence rather than some cosmic unifier. And if per the Law of Chekhov’s Gun, this gun has to go off, when it does the significance of the gunshot is skewered too, because when Cozy and Lee Ray Harold shoot someone and go on the lam, it is quickly revealed that they only think they shot someone. No one was shot at all. This marks “River of Grass” as unique – a Lovers on the Lam movie in which the lovers are not really on the lam, outfitting the proceedings with a tragedy so depressingly comic you almost want to cry, and that comicality is what makes the pointed lack of empathy for these two bozos immaterial; there is no intent to engender empathy, just to observe.

This suboptimal Bonnie & Clyde decide to flee the Sunshine State, but they can’t because they have next to no money, and thus hole up in some halfway house posing as a hotel where they are forced to shoot Palmetto Bugs in the bathroom. Lee Ray Harold subsequently goes on a “crime spree”, a crime spree which consists of plundering a drier at a laundromat and stealing his sack of groceries after another guy commits the robbery Lee Ray Harold couldn’t bring himself to attempt. Cozy fancies them as a kind of modern variation of Kit and Holly in “Badlands”, but they are not; they are not even close.

It’s fascinating to view “River of Grass” through the prism of time, not just in comparison to Reichardt’s later output but in contrast to the wave of crime films that were released in the mid-90’s, particularly in the wake of Tarantino, when so many would be auteur hepcats tried making crime films for yucks and stylistic kicks. “River of Grass”, however, lands somewhere off the grid, more akin to George Armitage’s wonderful and woefully underrated odd duck crime thriller “Miami Blues”, which also refused in any way whatsoever to romanticize or thoughtfully unpack the criminal mind. The criminal mind, in the case of Cozy and Lee Ray Harold, is woefully inadequate, so much so that they are ultimately foiled by a tollbooth, which is one of the most gloriously purposeful climactic letdowns I’ve ever seen in a film, leaving you stricken with laughter, until it suddenly, almost elliptically, turns, as if Cozy has become hell bent on becoming the Bonnie Parker she only thought she was, before she passes a place the movie has already been, like she’s just driving in circles.

There’s this shot in “River of Grass” that just floored me. It’s early, after Cozy gets pulled over by a cop, but not really pulled over by a cop, because she knows the cop and he just saw her and wanted to talk, dispense some advice. Reichardt sets the shot on the side of a freeway, a not-yet-operational elevated mixmaster towering behind them. It’s all-white, and looks almost futuristic, like an alien-approved skyway stretching up toward the clouds. The mixmaster is not yet operational, however, and so the roads go nowhere, like Cozy’s life, maybe like all our lives.

Old Joy

“We’ll just have to find another rhythm.” This is what Mark (Daniel London) says to his longtime friend Kurt (Will Oldham) about life as he knows it and the baby he and his wife, Tanya (Tanya Smith), are expecting. But it also aptly describes the small but generally fabulous oeuvre of the film’s auteur, Kelly Reichardt, a woman who has found a different cinematic rhythm, one that can sometimes feel akin to the journey undertaken by Rachel Nuwer of the BBC in which she attempted to locate the last place on Earth without human noise. Reichardt is not afraid of silence and she often seems to be explicitly attempting to convey what silence can mean in a world infiltrated almost exclusively by noise. Her films often have political and social bents as well, yet “Old Joy”, from 2006, the barely 75 minute feature that seemingly started her recent run of creativity (“Wendy and Lucy”, “Meek’s Cutoff”, “Night Moves”), appears most intent on exploring what happens in our heads when everything goes quiet.

The film’s opening shots involve Mark meditating in the backyard of his Oregon home. This meditation quite unreservedly comes across futile, particularly when he fields a phone call from Kurt, whom he hasn’t seen in years, wondering if he might like to meet up for a hike to some supposedly mystical hot spring in the wilderness. He “runs it by” Tanya and she wonders about the point of running it by her since they both already know he’s going. It’s a conversation about how they don’t have conversations, and they both know it and neither seems to have any idea what to do about it, and this signals a communication breakdown, one which Reichardt seems quite content to hammer home in her laconic way.

As Mark drives to pick up Kurt, he listens to talk radio, pundits hollering about politics, but this feels less like rhetoric than aesthetic, the drone of background noise that follows everyone everywhere. Upon picking up his pal, in one of those anti-narrative decisions that many might resist, “Old Joy” follows them as they wind their way out of town, the camera insisting on the transition from the non-descript factories and hazy gray turnpikes and rote freeway signs to the evergreen forestry. This insistence lets us feel the fumes of the cityscape fall away. Still, the characters struggle to breathe in the replenishing oxygen. They get lost, not in that horror movie way but in that realistically meandering way. We see how time has subtly frayed their friendship – Kurt clinging to scraps of the past, Mark warily crawling toward the future. They came to clear their minds, yet the clouds won’t part.

The film’s finest shot is deceptively simple, placing the camera in back of the car and watching Mark field a phone call from his wife and exit the vehicle and walk up the road as we watch along with the Kurt through the windshield. This is it what it takes to be noise-free in present day America, for the other person to take his phone off into the woods. Yet when presented a moment of genuine silence, Kurt tokes up, as if the prevalence of our own thoughts is precisely what terrifies him about alone time.

Reichardt gradually builds “Old Joy” to a moment when both characters are left alone with their own thoughts, and what she does with it is brilliantly tricky. She plays on the audience’s own ideas of what happens absent human noise in a subverted Hitchcockian kind of way so that when a certain moment of behavior occurs between them, we, like Mark, think Kurt must be up to something nefariously bizarre. We can’t calm down. We can’t relax. We can’t shut off. And “Old Joy” makes clear how numbingly difficult it can be to get there. And when we do, we return to the sounds of talk radio and the noises of the street. Manohla Dargis of the esteemed New York Times saw hope in the final shots. I thought of when I return to the streets of the city from peaceful respites of seclusion and immediately, unintentionally and frustratingly drop right back into patterns of self-narration of exasperation, the urban sprawl re-consuming me. Joy, it's so hard to come by, so hard to sustain.

Night Moves

Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) inspects a motorboat his two fellow environmentalists, Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning), have purchased for decidedly non-recreational reasons, and wistfully points out that with a little care it would likely still have years left. Well, he’s not just talking about the boat, he’s talking about earth, because with a little care our friendly blue planet would likely have years left in it. Such tree-hugging optimism, however, ignores their real intent, which is to pack the boat full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, park it by a mammoth hydroelectric dam and blow it to kingdom come. And if that’s true, it would seem these environmentalists turned eco-terrorists are subverting the very idea that a little care toward mother Earth goes a long way. Maybe all men, violent clowns in Gotham and staunch vegans alike, just want to watch the world burn.

Then again, “Night Moves”, the jaw-dropping new film from director (and editor and co-writer) Kelly Reichardt, refrains from spelling out its characters’ exact intentions. Minimalism is her preferred technique, and while it could be said that minimalism attempts to get at the truth by withholding, I would argue that she shows us all we need to know. This is not to say our principal trio explicitly debate ethics. Aside from a single passage not even involving them, we are pointedly left to wonder “the point.” Sure, Josh has some brief rambling about how their actions will get people “talking”, but talking about what and to what purpose?

Yet despite this absence of motivation, each character is provided a specific voice, the means by which we get to know them. Harmon is oddly breezy, as if such vigilant acts of green-minded rebellion are old hat for him. Dena, the rich girl with the cash to fund the operation and who has never gone along for something of this scale and illegality, is a classic Chatty Cathy, cracking jokes and talking fast and apparently unaware of what emotionally awaits. Her chatter, in fact, is what allows them to score the necessary amount of a fertilizer from a suspicious store owner, a scene that in any other movie would be crafted for suspense but is intended here to simply observe behavior. It’s a scene that makes you believe in the kindness of strangers even as it simultaneously proves that idiom a lie. Her talkativeness leaves us to wonder the precise relationship between she and Josh, since he is tight-lipped and closed-off, emitting a strong air of torment but without convenient clues regarding what ails him or where he comes from.

One sequence finds Josh returning to Harmon's hidden-away trailer with dinner, only to pause on account of sounds emanating from inside. Though it's never overtly addressed, we and Josh are left to assume Harmon and Dena are having sex. Rather than combust, he sets down the food and sets off for a stroll through the woods. In other words, love for nature is what drives him, not a love for anyone else. It's a remarkable emphasizing of opposite desires - selfless and selfish - driving them all. 

Reichardt’s previous work has determinedly made the landscape a supporting character, particularly in the brilliant "Meek's Cutoff", where a group on the Oregon Trail comes to feel the landscape as a vice, the gorgeously rocky vistas threatening to press in and squash them as their journey goes awry. In "Night Moves", the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, inhabited by organic farmers and naturalists, is a distinctly serene place even amidst the rainy gray. Yet there are other moments frightfully illustrating man's dismissal of its own pristine surroundings. Consider the sequence when our principal trio drives through a campground. We see them from within the interior of a nameless couple’s motor home, the apparent husband and wife ignoring the trees of Joyce Kilmer poems to watch a game show on their gas guzzling vehicle’s mounted television. The indignation in the shot is overt, and other moments sprinkled through are just as rife with acrimony (such as an area of burnt-out trees painting the forest as a neglected hellscape), and yet what most interests Reichardt in the end is not deploring anti-environmentalists (or even the environmentally clueless) but questioning the motivation of eco-terrorists.

Thematically, "Night Moves" feels most influenced by "If A Tree Falls", the 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary that chronicled a failed terrorist operation by the Earth Liberation Front leaving certain members of its sect in jail or on the run. The overriding idea there had less to do with ecology than with the empty realization all their so-called action changed nothing. How much regret certain characters in "Night Moves" feel is debatable, but what comes in loud and clear is the futility of their choice. The eventual explosion itself is heard off camera, never seen, perhaps a budgetary decision, but more likely a signifier how something that may inflict fiscal and symbolic damage is still just background noise.

This is the closest Reichardt has yet come to submitting a genuine genre piece, and she includes red herrings and manufactured suspense, like a flat tire at the worst time, while the third act centers around a moral dilemma as old as Michael Corleone, and beyond. Even so, the film never feels stale nor fake, pulsing with a taciturn dread, a portion of which can be traced directly to Eisenberg's performance. He's gone down in pop culture to this point as a loquacious neurotic, but proves entirely convincing as someone forever clammed up. And the more he loses control of the situation, the more he withdraws, eventually losing himself not in Oregon's forested valleys but in the perpetuating urban jungle.

In "Night Moves" it is not the landscape threatening to eat its characters alive, but industry and commerce threatening to eat the landscape, and soon all that will be left is parking lots of concrete and SUV’s, and outlet stores peddling high-priced equipment for camping trips no one wants to take.

Meek's Cutoff

Welcome to a momentum-free zone. Director Kelly Reichardt’s take on the Oregon Trail wagon train opus has no interest in maintaining any sort of momentum it begins to generate, probably because those hopeful settlers coming across the continent never got much momentum going either. You’re making your way and things seem all right but then you come across a river and you have to ford it, you have to ford the oxen and the wagons and tiny birds you’re keeping in cages and then you have to dry off and get everything packed back up and then start again. An axle breaks on the wagon and you can’t just hit up Jake’s Auto Parts for a replacement, nope, you’ve gotta re-fashion it yourself. Your wagon train happens upon a steep ravine and so you have to lower the wagons one-by-one with every member of your party holding onto it for dear life by a rope you hope holds.

The characters in "Meek’s Cutoff" are forever moving, hopefully forward, hopefully to catch up with the Columbia River which will hopefully take them to the mystical Willamette Valley, but for their all their movement it feels distinctly, purposely, like they never get anywhere. The empty rocky vistas always look the same. It’s always one more hill, it’s always “one day, maybe two.” In quiet, plaintive tones Reichardt implicitly captures how it must have felt to be these brave and reckless pioneers, not to suggest she, as they say, puts us in their shoes, but in that helpless feeling of going and going and going and getting nowhere.

The wagon train consists of Solomon and Emily Tetherow (Will Patton and Michelle Williams), Thomas and Millie Gateley (Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan) and William and Glory White (Neal Huff and Shirley Henderson) and their young son. Their faithful (in theory) leader is Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) who has the buckskins and the big, brawny beard and the tall tales but seemingly no sense of direction. Everyone think he’s lost. Not that they’d call him on it. Well, eventually they do. At least, Emily does. “We ain’t lost,” he replies. “We’re just finding our way.” (Read: We’re lost.)


They need water, of course, to survive and Meek leads them to a watering hole only to deduce that, tragically, they can’t water there. Why not? At this point Reichardt does a curious, brilliant thing. We watch from the point of view of the bonnet-wearing women as the men stand a little ways off and debate. At first I thought the volume on my TV was turned down too low and so I turned it up. I still couldn’t hear anything. Maybe,”Can’t water” and “Head south” but that was it. It’s a subtle shift in point-of-view and Meek’s Cutoff is all about point-of-view. The camera remains with the wagon train for the duration of the movie. There are a few wide shots of the wagon train making its way but these are only to underscore the helplessness, not to provide bearings, and if characters ride off or on up ahead the camera does not follow and stays behind. And at this point at the watering hole Reichardt, working in conjunction with her screenwriter Jon Raymond, slyly shifts the primary point-of-view to Emily.

She’s the first one who sights the Indian (Rod Rondeaux), watching the group silently from a ridge. Later she sees him again and chases him off. They debate. Is the Indian alone? Should they let him be? Should they track him down and kill him before he brings them harm? Solomon and Meek ride off and capture the Indian. Solomon wants to let him live because perhaps he can guide them to water. Meek wants to slit his throat on the spot. The Indian lives, but rather than make him a symbol the film leaves him at arm’s length, too. He can’t understand them and they can’t understand him. It’s just more disorientation and even with the Indian possibly working as guide they still don’t seem to know where they’re going (possibly because the Indian doesn’t want them to know where they’re going, but who knows?!).


The pace of "Meek’s Cutoff" may seem slow in the context of what we are conditioned to so often expect, yet the sensation gleaned in every scene and in nearly every frame is one of desperate and fearful urgency, real lives being played out before you with real stakes, characters that simply exist rather than coming across as great actors greatly playing their parts (which they are). The cinematography is breathless but leaves you pinned in and occasionally claustrophobic. It can be discomforting to watch but eventually you realize you’ve taken this journey with these people and you’ve reached the same point. The actual end leaves many questions unanswered while still working as a picture perfect resolution of the film’s emotional arc. Is it strange that the final words made me think of the key wisdom in another 2011 western film, the animated "Rango"? Try as they might, these characters can’t walk out on their story.