There’s a fantastic story about thorny sibling rivalry and repressed secrets set on a beautiful but worryingly secluded ranch in the Montana outback, but Montana Story isn’t it. Each of these elements are present, but there’s little else in common with last year’s brilliant The Power of the Dog. Instead, Montana Story, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, draws out a slow-paced family drama that withholds information in the service of tension that never quite pays off despite some fine performances. What’s left is a lot of lugubriousness under the big sky, and some clunky efforts at driving home a trite moral lesson.
Owen Teague plays Cal, a young man who has returned to the family ranch to watch over his dying father who is not expected to emerge from a stroke-induced coma. The arrival of his estranged sister, Erin (Haley Lu Richardson), opens up a history of trauma and resentment that is left unexplained for part of the movie. It’s initially interesting to parse out the complicated relationship dynamics which emerge in dialogue, while some peripheral characters add intriguing dimension to this tangle. A seasoned nurse, Ace (Gilbert Owuor), and a longtime caretaker, Valentina (Kimberly Guerrero), personify the wisdom and kindness that the ailing father apparently lacked. Cal’s presence is dutiful but dour, and Erin blusters onto the scene with a chip on her shoulder and years of resentment that she doesn’t bother to hide. It’s obvious that her anger is mostly directed at her dying father; what’s less clear is why she’s so cold to Cal. This is the mystery that drives the first half of the movie.
Bewilderingly, this tension is defused at the story’s midpoint when the usually taciturn Cal unloads a monologue on Ace, recounting a terrible day when their father, a morally-compromised lawyer for a mining company, beat the hell out of Erin for her environmental activism—a scene which Cal witnessed but failed to intervene in. It seems a bit strange that Erin would appear to hold as much rancor for her brother as for her father, given that Cal was only 15 at the time. When the father shot her horse dead, she packed up and left overnight, cutting herself off entirely from her family. With this tortured past laid bare, the film becomes a study in the slow reconciliation between the siblings. Teague and Richardson find sympathetic angles within this relationship, where much of their reconnecting occurs with the shorthand and telegraphic nature of the brother-sister bond. But the story’s central tension feels diminished with the revelations of their shared trauma, and the film’s pacing slows to a crawl.
Giles Nuttgens’ cinematography offers some spectacular vistas—unlike The Power of the Dog, this movie was actually filmed on location in Montana—and the score features some frontier-appropriate country tunes where the primary activity seems to be riding around in pickup trucks. When Erin hatches a scheme to transport the family’s surviving horse all the way back to her home in the Hudson River Valley, the story digresses into a detailed subplot that doesn’t quite pan out. All the complicated backstory is eventually reduced to the simple logic of weights and counterweights: wrongs will be righted, the lost will be saved, the wicked will be punished.
Cal’s redemption was never really in doubt, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story left, but it takes a deus ex machina to set those gears in motion. There’s a sense that much more interesting stories are buried within all this. What’s the deal with Ace the nurse and his almost magically wise bedside manner? Does Valentina’s maternal affection for both siblings imply that she was more than a caretaker during all her years of service to the family? And just how evil was the mining company the father worked for? A memorable scene places Cal and Erin at an overlook gazing down on a truly horrifying strip mine where an entire mountain has been transformed into a crater like an inverted pyramid punched into the earth. The sight is an astonishing monument to destruction and greed, and a stark contrast to the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape. It’s a shame the rest of the movie isn’t quite as interesting as that hole in the ground.
Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street
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