Opening on a slide show in an empty classroom, a storm thundering away outside, black and white frontier images flicker. They feature carriages, trains, and indigenous persons communicating with settlers; miners, hunters, and cavalry troops: a romantic portrait of Manifest Destiny. Cut to a Black woman sitting in silence at a crematorium, soon watching her mother’s ashes go up in flames. She buries them in the snow up high on a mountainside, the compositional slant of Montana’s landscape recalling the sensitivity of a Western melodrama filmmaker like Delmer Daves. Though it often looks and feels like a terse rural thriller akin to “Frozen River” or “Winter’s Bone” on the surface, “God’s Country,” led by a magnificent performance from Thandiwe Newton, is more “Jubal” or “Johnny Guitar” in spirit, meshing activist-tinged realism with a stripped-down genre formula to staggering results.
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A professor of public speaking living alone in a large house — acres and acres of beautiful Montana stretching for miles —Sandra (Newton), only one day removed from saying goodbye to the woman who raised her, finds an abandoned red truck parked on her property. She leaves a note asking the owners to please not do so, hoping that will resolve the matter. When a pair of hunters (Joris Jarsky and Jefferson White) return the next day in the same vehicle, however, claiming they have no clue what note she speaks of, Sandra asks the men, again, to please park and enter the forest in a different area. The encounter quickly turns into a racially tinged confrontation of aggressive posturing, and, after the two men exit the immediate area to hunt their game, Sandra tows that damned truck off her property. That night an arrow is shot into her front door.
Calling the local sheriff — or acting sheriff, Gus Wolf (an excellent Jeremy Bobb, whose character is sadly not afforded closure) — Sandra is warned that “the gentlemen will see this as an escalation.” Why do you keep calling them gentlemen?” Sandra asks, “They shot an arrow into my door.” “Around here, contacting authorities only makes things worse,” he tells her. “Then what is the point of you?” she asks. “What exactly do you do?” All he can as the lone remaining law enforcement figure within miles, basically.
In a pair of marvelously, tensely sustained sequences, Sandra accompanies Gus to pay the hunter’s preying on her a visit — in a tragically befitting detail, the men make their living wearing Santa hats and selling Christmas trees when not shooting baby deer. It’s in these scenes that the film makes a clear point to display its initially presented as despicable antagonists as well-rounded people; with the exception of one, that is, each flawed character is seen via different sides, the writers (Shaye Ogbonna and director Julian Higgins, adapting James Lee Burke‘s short story, “Winter Light“) always keen to empathetic fairness.
Shot with imminent dread in the form of contemptuous American anger bellying a stunning topography, by cinematographer Andrew Wheeler, “God’s Country” has a powerful mood and atmosphere, stretches of silence deployed with invisibly adept skill that never loses a handle on its ominously tender humanism; until the last act, unfortunately, which arrives with balefully abrupt inevitability. Still, Higgins has a clear way with filmmaking textures — a brief chase scene that’s pace, setting, and composition forward is a standout, in addition to a handful of other set pieces that manage to balance breathtaking directorial skill with hostile political dread.
“I think we can all start to listen and learn from people who don’t have the same perspective as us. You call it diversity. It just seems like the right thing to do,” one of Sandra’s fellow faculty says at a hiring meeting. Though the side plot is underdeveloped her frustrations with a country and community, near always out to get her, comes to a boiling point in a poignant social critique, systemic discrimination and inappropriate staff behavior rearing its head. Facing harsh truths head-on with bone-weary vigilance, Sandra ends up feeling like a forlorn and forsaken outlaw — something of a cross between a Paul Schrader and Dardenne Brothers protagonist. Deserted by a workplace and landscape whose wintry indignation is reciprocated in kind, Newton carries the film with intrepid resolve, turning in an amenable performance that’s inflamed in its downcast nature, while earning wholly justified sympathy. The white man doesn’t own the Earth, at least not Sandra’s part of it. [B+]
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