Director Audrey Cummings’s Place of Bones does not begin with much promise. The actors seem a bit stilted, as if either too much or too little rehearsing led to exaggerated enunciation of fairly obvious dialogue. The scenario that arises after a few minutes’ introduction appears on its face to be rather outlandish, relying on some contrivance or convenience even to be possible. The sets and costumes, although apparently accurate to its setting on a remote ranch somewhere in the Old West in the year 1876, have something of a pedestrian air about them, revealing that the movie was likely made on the cheap and on the quick.
What follows is akin to watching a flower gradually open its petals before our eyes, and leading the charge in this endeavor is screenwriter Richard Taylor, who gives us a small ensemble of smart, consistently evolving, and surprisingly deep characters. The performances reveal layers while the characters remain firmly within their established and familiar types, and the dialogue eventually conveys that intelligence through a series of witty exchanges – as if Taylor is borrowing as much from the theater as from the Western genre. The smallness of the production becomes a benefit, especially because this is a movie that only pulls out a gun when it’s necessary. It doesn’t matter, then, what budget Cummings and the film’s producers had at their disposal.
Pandora Meadows (Heather Graham) is a widow living on the ranch that was a dowery from her late husband, and her daughter Hester (Brielle Robillard) has been kept in isolation from the outside world her entire life. The mother sees no need to involve herself or her child in that world, and in any case, this ranch is nearly 100 miles from the nearest town. These two have provided for themselves all these years, and now, Pandora, a “hard woman” (as multiple characters rightfully label her), is teaching Hester to speak proper English, to pray to the good Lord for His blessings, and never to stray too far past the spot where they buried her father. This isolation cannot last, obviously.
A man arrives, weakened and wounded by gunfire, at their doorstep, and through their hesitancy and caution, they do allow him houseroom. Calhoun (Corin Nemec) weaves a wild tale of an armed bank robbery gone horribly awry: Do they trust this man, who speaks with such crassness and so many demands? For a little while, it seems that the only conflict for these women is whether their generosity should extend beyond the degree to which it would be the Christian thing to do. The other problem, Calhoun claims, is waiting outside, somewhere in the forest.
Until this point, the film moves awkwardly and barely seems to want to breathe for fear of anything disrupting that awkward rhythm. Graham and especially Robillard have been oddly mannered in their portrayals of unnatural isolation, and Nemec is a little too earnest in the way he insists upon approaching his role with humor. That changes, though, with a sudden and jarring shift in the dynamic between the women and the intruder, who is made to stay in this bed until Pandora and Hester decide what to do with him. Meanwhile, some men pursuing Calhoun might end up making some of their decisions for them.
This is where it gets tricky to talk about the details of the movie, and the fascinating thing about saying so is that only 20 minutes have gone by at this point. There are some other men whose affiliations with an associate of Calhoun’s are absolutely no good and are assuredly criminal on the trail of the money Calhoun made away with. The leader of this new group is Bear John (Tom Hopper), who is accompanied by a no-frills lieutenant (Donald Cerrone) and a tracker (Gattlin Griffith) whose mastery of his craft is one of the early signs that we’re in for something unexpected with this movie. The latter’s introduction involves figuring out precisely how a scene of bloody violence came to be that way, at first through silent observation and then through sound reasoning.
It’s a disarming scene because it’s precisely what those worrisome opening minutes told us not to expect, and the centerpiece sequence – in which the bad guys close in on the ranch while Hester makes her way back home from an errand – is a considerable achievement of suspense and a notable use of space and distance. Of course, the climax is a shootout, but it develops with cruel logic. The characters in Place of Bones are uniformly intelligent, existing to outsmart each other instead of bumbling blindly into circumstances beyond their abilities. The final scene, meanwhile, reveals the film’s true outlook, and it underlines a darkly comic, punishingly bleak, admirably stripped-bare Western.
Photo courtesy of The Avenue
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