On Swift Horses

 

Director Daniel Minahan

author Shannon Pufahl

ON SWIFT HORSES             B                                                                                                     USA  (117 mi)  2024  d: Daniel Minahan

You ever feel like that, though?  Like there’s just this narrow window of time when what you want might come to you?

A mostly slow and quiet 50’s film about forbidden desires, or the underside of the American Dream, where people are not what they appear to be or act like we expect, carefully concealing their queer desires in order to be accepted into the Eisenhower postwar mainstream, when white conservatism was guided by rules that excluded anyone who was different, often violently, feeling no remorse whatsoever in their exclusionary behavior, nothing to apologize for, as a fast track to success depended on it.  Adapted by Bryce Kass from the 2019 novel by Shannon Pufahl (an excerpt may be read here: On Swift Horses), now teaching creative writing at Stanford University, who grew up in rural Kansas, inspired by memories of her own grandmother, dedicating the book to her, introducing the young author to the world of gambling at a young age, accompanying her on many trips to Las Vegas, driving from one gambling mecca to the next, setting the story in the mid-50’s, a time of promise, yet also dreams deferred, exploring repressed desires and a fluctuating identity during a time when the nation was going through a major peacetime transformation, not yet sure what to expect, yet the outlook for the future was an unlimited horizon.  Exuding a strong sense of place, inimitably drawn to the 1950’s American West, a time that preceded the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, typically seen through the eyes of straight white men, this film is rich with detail, showcasing unique characters who counter the narrative of a conservatively safe and secure America, where they are instead willing to take risks, gambling with their lives that something better lies ahead. Described by the director as “a re-imagining of the American Dream through a queer lens,” this film relies on small coded gestures, like a glance, a lingering touch, or a matchbook passed along, where gambling is used as a metaphor for being queer during a time when it was extremely dangerous, considered a crime, something kept under the rug, with almost no public discourse about it, barely ever mentioned or talked about in the mainstream, yet they are ordinary people leading ordinary lives.  While he’s worked in television, including several episodes of Game of Thrones (2011 – 2019), as well as American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (2018), this is only the second film from this director since the comedy noir thriller SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS (2001), an edgy satire on reality TV shows run wild.  Very faithful to the book, a historical fiction novel with LGBTQ+ themes, and while it pales in comparison to the generation-defining Ang Lee adaptation of Brokeback Mountain (2005), this film offers a vision of the 50’s that is distinctly at odds with the idea that this decade was an American golden age, evocative of the subversive melodramas of Douglas Sirk, like All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written On the Wind (1956), or Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002) and 2015 Top Ten List #6 Carol, with a nod to Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008), reminding us that there was never a time when women didn’t work outside the home, where nostalgic reflections often omit the bigotry and oppression experienced.  Beautifully shot by Luc Montpellier, Sarah Polley’s cinematographer who shot Take This Waltz (2011) and 2023 Top Ten List #1 Women Talking, this is part romance, part suspense thriller, and part drama, filled with multiple meandering subplots, where in the end the disparate elements may never really come together, feeling uneven, lacking a coherent vision, but there’s a literary aspect that feels intimately familiar.    

In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, atomic bombs are being tested in the empty desert outside of Las Vegas, a spectacle that literally lights up the skies, drawing plenty of spectators, yet it’s also an era of suburban sprawl and a massive national highway movement connecting the entire country together, while there are also advancements in color television, all of which plays in the background of the story, cleverly announced by a melancholic Loren Kramar cover version of 1959 HITS ARCHIVE: Mr. Blue - Fleetwoods (a #1 record) YouTube (2:23), which plays over a collage of photo albums from the period, with an original score composed by Mark Orton.  Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter) are living a quiet life in an isolated part of Kansas, in a home Muriel’s late mother left to her, with floral wallpaper and old wooden furniture, where no neighbor can be seen for miles, yet the prevailing sentiment is that Muriel feels “orphaned and alone” after the death of her mother, the first woman in town to get a car, a college degree, and a divorce, so out of respect for her mother’s independence she’s been coy to Lee’s persistent marriage requests.  But that all changes when Lee’s more charismatic brother Julius arrives, played by Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who inhabited the role of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023), playing another free spirit of a different kind here, a wayward gambler with a secret past, whose mere presence stirs something deep inside Muriel, both feeling the same sense of alienation, like two lost souls.  The two brothers are close, having made a pact during the war that they would pool their money to buy a home together when the war was over, with the home providing a stability they never had, so for Lee, marriage is essential, as that embodies his conception of “home.”  Julius is more of a free spirit, immediately drawing the attention of Muriel, fascinated by his easygoing freedom, feeling an attraction that was not about sex which she doesn’t fully understand, yet both are acutely observant outsiders, making her feel that “the world was bigger than she had imagined.”  This idea of a love triangle incites a sudden interest in marriage, but as soon as they trek across the country to discover a brand new housing development in San Diego, Julius vanishes for Las Vegas, sleeping with women and men for money, eventually hooking up with a Vegas casino as part of their security detail, where his job is to surveil the customers from a one-way mirror located above the floor, where he can view them undetected from a variety of angles, earning extra bonuses when he spots cheaters, who are never prosecuted, but taken out back where they are brutally pummeled and run out of town.  It’s Lee’s dream to own a suburban house, one that Muriel acquiesces to, even if that means she’ll have to sell her mother’s house, which for her is a personal oasis and her only real connection to family, one of the many sacrifices she’ll have to make in the interest of keeping up appearances, which is all a façade, as she’s never really loved Lee or wanted to be part of his straightlaced world, but was always more fascinated by his restless brother, lured by his existential angst, yet Lee has warned her about Julius, “He’s not like us; his passions are different…he gets to live like there’s no tomorrow.”  Nonetheless, they secretly correspond with one another by mail, encouraging each other, sharing their private thoughts, unbeknownst to her husband.  Yet the manner in which this evolves can feel overly predetermined, lacking any feeling of naturalness or spontaneity, where it all fits together, but lacks dramatic urgency until the final few sequences that add a distinctly poetic texture.  

In something of parallel stories, the heart of the film is following the secret lives of both Muriel and Julius, both using deception as a means of self-preservation, with Muriel working as a waitress at a racetrack café, keeping notes on what she’s able to overhear, then placing bets accordingly, where her success rate is phenomenal, earning a healthy stack of money, which she contributes to the down payment on their new home, telling her husband she got the money by selling the home in Kansas, but she keeps a secret stash behind a mirror, offering her a sense of independence, while Julius develops a crush for another man, Henry, played by Diego Calva from Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022), both working next to each other by night while having steamy sex during the day.  Muriel has a few secret flings of her own, both with women, meeting Gail (Katrina Cunningham) at the track, a sultry blonde, eventually finding she hangs out at the dingy Chester Hotel catering to a same sex clientele, introducing her to an undiscovered world where men dance with men and women with women, where she is informed, “We’re all just a hair’s breadth from losing everything, all the time,” while closer to home she runs into Sandra (Sasha Calle), who is part of a vibrant queer community, trying to keep her family farm operational on her own while a proposed highway is expected to cut through her land, something passed down from her Mexican heritage.  In each case, curiosity gets the best of them, yet the scenes are surprisingly tame, with no real nudity, only occasional flashes of skin, where the real problem lies with British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, who generates no real erotic chemistry or heat, and is surprisingly bland in her personality, feeling overly naïve, with her ultra-repressed housewife resembling Anne Hathaway, where she just has difficulty carrying a picture.  Jacob Elordi, on the other hand, is a throwback to the personal magnetism of 50’s screen icons like James Dean or Montgomery Clift, where he and Henry exhibit passion right from the start and it never lets up, even when they’re no longer onscreen, as it carries over.  There’s a subtle jab at race differences, as both Muriel and Julius have it so much easier than the paths of Sandra and Henry because they’re white, easily forgiven for their many transgressions, as no one ever scrutinizes their behavior, with Sandra at one point expressing outrage at Muriel’s patronizing attitude, showing little regard for what others are subjected to, where this issue is more hinted at than elaborated with any degree of depth.  Instead the prevailing emotion is a melancholic anguish, as neither love nor the American Dream provide any real degree of satisfaction, where there’s a gaping hole missing that is left unfilled, taking great pains to explain what it was like being closeted in the 50’s, an era where repressed sexuality and queer relations go hand in hand, eloquently interweaving Southern California’s illicit gay joints, Mexico, and memories of Kansas, where the most poignant image is a Chester Hotel bulletin board for lost lovers who have missed their connections, leaving little personal notes attached, often with photos, in hopes they could find each other, which is how they maintained connections in the shadows, emblematic of how queer people always find each other, even in the most repressed environments, with Muriel finally discovering that the mystery Julius represents actually resides deep within her own restless soul.  The finale offers the allure of freedom, a possibility of a better future, but it’s etched in heartbreak and despair, where distance is real, whether emotionally or geographically, reflective of the extreme isolation queer people felt at the time, as each gets increasingly lonely and lost, beautifully encapsulated by the melancholic song written exclusively for the film playing over the end credits, Loren Kramar’s Song For Henry YouTube (4:15), where it’s hard to imagine this story ending any other way. 

Nebraska

NEBRASKA          B+             
USA  (115 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Alexander Payne 

One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,

It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

An Old Man's Winter Night, by Robert Frost from Mountain Interval, 1920

A sad and solemn affair, a minimalist and spared down look at a man near the end of his life, where perhaps what matters most in a man’s life is not the million dollar fantasy that this film suggests, but his pride in being a man.  Especially growing up in small towns where there’s hardly much difference between people’s lives, as they all pretty much look the same, so the way you take stock of your own life is what eventually matters most.  What might surprise some is the complete absence of religion or the presence of a church anywhere to be seen, replaced here by the influence of corner taverns, which is almost entirely an all-male event, much like gathering around the television in the living room to watch football while the women chatter away in the kitchen.  Other than when they’re drinking, most of these men lead silent, uneventful lives, revealing little about themselves, reflecting the emotional reserve that connects them to the hard-scrabble life of growing up on a farm.  Bruce Dern has a rare lead role, his first in over twenty-five years, playing Woody Grant, a Korean War veteran with a history of drinking too much, now grizzled and forgetful, hard-of-hearing and near-senile, where he’s easily mistaken for an Alzheimer’s patient, even within his own family, who are contemplating putting him in a retirement home.  But he still lives at home in Billings, Montana with his acid-tongued wife Kate (June Squibb), who appears to be his alter-ego, as without her pestering him all the time, he’d be even more lethargic.  At issue is a junk mail letter from a Publishing Clearance House-style sweepstakes marketing firm informing him that he’s won a million dollars, while in fine print it specifies only if he has the winning numbers on the sweepstakes ticket.  Despite being told it’s just a scam, Woody is convinced he’s won a million dollars, but needs to trek to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his winnings.  Day in and day out, he’s picked up by local police along the interstate highway where he intends to walk the 850 miles.  Finally fed up with this routine, his younger son David (Will Forte) decides he’ll drive him to Nebraska and he can see for himself what fortune lies in store for him. 

While the film bears some similarity to David Lynch’s THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999), the 73-year old Alvin Straight went on his journey alone, without any help, offering a kind of mystical wisdom to people he encountered along the way, even camping out under the stars at night, where his gentle, easy-going personality carried more weight.  While Kate thinks they’ve both got a screw loose, “You dumb cluck,” David and his Dad set out on the open road, where soon they are in the middle of nowhere, which are easily the most gorgeous shots in the film, shot in ‘Scope and in Black and White by Phedon Papamichael Jr. (the son of John Cassavetes’s art director and production designer), where the flat, wintry emptiness of the desolate landscapes match Woody’s gruff interior mood, feeling lost and isolated from everyone else, continually drifting off, with fewer moments of clarity.  Along the way, they visit Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota, but Woody is barely impressed, claiming it looks unfinished, “Why is George Washington the only one with any clothes, and Lincoln has an ear missing.”  Unable to get to Lincoln by the close of business on Friday, they take a detour into Hawthorne in central Nebraska, Woody’s home town, where his wife will come down and they’ll stay with one of his brothers, with more coming, making it a family reunion.  Since you can’t keep a secret in any small town, word gets out that Woody has won a million dollars, making him the biggest thing the town’s seen in ages.  While David tries to downplay the money aspect, claiming there is none, no one will hear of it, claiming Woody is a town celebrity.  People come out of the woodworks to pat him on the back, wish him well, where even the town newspaper sends a photographer over to take his picture (a kid on a bicycle), with an accompanying cover story soon to be released.  David tries to quell the maddening storm by speaking to the newspaper publisher (Angela McEwan), who, it turns out, used to have a high school crush on his Dad, but knew she was never in the running, as “I didn’t let him play the bases.”    

A portrait of working class America, part of the film’s intrigue is the familiarity with the Nebraska landscape, the fourth Payne film to take place in his home state, where he is single-handedly the region’s poet laureate on celluloid, beautifully capturing the shape of cloud formations, lone farmhouses, empty, run-down towns, where part of his visual vernacular is finding the trademark images that are underrepresented in other movies.  Going to considerable length to capture the authenticity of the region, Payne chose many locals to act in his film, many of them living in Plainview, Nebraska, where much of the film was shot, including many retired farmers who live nearby.  In addition to Angela McEwan, whose friendly small town kindness gets noticed (she baked cookies for Payne on the day they initially met), so does Rance Howard as Uncle Ray, Woody’s couch potato older brother, who happens to be the real life father of director Ron Howard.  Certainly that kindness rubs off on the young son, David, who sticks up for his old man throughout the picture, just trying to offer him a bit of dignity in his waning years, where it pains him to see his father made the butt of bad jokes, especially when the vultures come in for the road kill, as everyone wants a piece of the money, especially his old business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), who gets creepier by the minute.  For Woody, it’s just holding onto a pleasant memory or a sweet dream, where he’s the kind of guy that can’t say no to others, always willing to give them a helping hand, even at his own expense.  Much of this is a reflection of the Midwestern way of life, where the film suggests offering a helpful hand to others is dying in America, a part of the culture that doesn’t exist anymore, like so many of the faded landmarks shot in solitude.  The music by Mark Orton is initially effective, especially some of the wordless landscape montages, but it’s overused and keeps repeating, becoming problematic after awhile.  While there are no great dramatic moments in this film, it makes the most of the small ones, often shot in a stream-of-conscious style, becoming a somber reflection of aging, of holding onto what you’ve got for as long as you can, even refusing to let go of that stubborn pride, as sometimes that’s all you’ve got left.  Winter is the season of life in the film, where for farmers the promise of next year’s crops lies frozen under a blanket of snow, where you never know what the next year will bring.