Looking for peace in all the wrong places.
Near the end of Hell or High Water, David Mackenzie’s tragic and powerful Western/crime fusion, one of its principal characters speaks of being haunted by the events that have transpired over the course of the film.
His adversary suggests the troubled man should confront him again, in a more isolated venue. “Maybe I’ll give you peace,” he says, euphemistically. “Maybe,” the troubled character shoots back quickly, “I’ll give it to you.”
It would be hard for anyone who has ever attended a liturgical church service not to hear in such an exchange a bitter, cruel inversion of the ritualistic “passing of the peace”: the greeting of “peace be with you” and the reply, “and also with you.” It is both strange and yet somehow fitting that in a film filled with violence perpetrated on human bodies that this violence against language could have the capacity to pain the audience in equal measure.
But it does.
Hell or High Water begins in medias res. Two masked men terrorize a middle-aged woman opening a Texas Midlands bank. When she doesn’t have the combination for the safe, they lay in wait for the manager to arrive, punching him in the nose despite his cooperation. Gradually their motivation is revealed. Tanner Howard (Ben Foster) is a convict who agrees to help his brother, Toby (Chris Pine), to rob enough banks to pay off a reverse mortgage and the back taxes on their family home. The brothers have less than a week before the bank forecloses on the property, and the stakes are raised by the fact that a contract for drilling oil on the land means the property will soon skyrocket in value.
Even before the film’s final confrontation, characters ...
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