HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016). One of my top 5 favorite American films of the new millennium. It's exactly the kind of film I want to make: it tackles elemental issues about America, via genre, without ever resorting to the easy rhetorical frameworks of the political left or right.

I've written before about Taylor Sheridan's screenplay, which is brilliance in its sheer simplicity: bouncing back & forth between two different oddball pairings, keeping the plot simple so the characters have room to be complex.

There's so many touches that raise the film above being a mere heist film. The brothers' plan is genuinely smart, & we get to simply observe them being smart: only taking small bills, & burying each of their stolen getaway cars. A lesser script would explain each of these moves.

The film knows that behavior > explanation. Simply seeing how the brothers, & the Texas rangers on their trail, react to things tells us 90% of what we need to know about them. Dialogue casually fills in the rest, in just a couple grace notes. Otherwise, we lean in to observe.

But it's also a wonderfully detailed, lived-in film. Tanner & Toby's dead mother's bedroom: it gives me literal flashbacks to my own grandmother's room, in a way that almost no other Hollywood film manages. Likewise, the day player casting is otherworldly good.

The film keeps doing all of this brilliant detail work on its margins: at the tail ends of scenes, or in the framing of its Texas/Oklahoma setting. Old timers at a diner rhapsodize about how this isn't the age for bank robberies. Billboards lend us local socio-economic backstory.

All these well-observed details accumulate & eventually we come to deeply understand both Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine's characters when they finally face-off. I never find myself choosing a side, but simply feeling, "This was inevitable. This is our country. This is life."

I could go on & on. About how -- w/o a single chase -- it has more exciting driving shit than about any recent film I can think of. About how the fight scene at the gas station gets me jumping to my feet. About how Margaret Bowman's t-bone waitress makes me wanna cry happy tears.

I could even pontificate about how I relate more & more with Ben Foster's character, especially after my adoptive father passed away last year not so long after informing me he was taking me out of his will in favor of his recently reconciled biological children.

All of this is just to say: this is a film that feels like it captures something about our age, but it doesn't wallow in it. In 30 years, we'll turn to each other and say, "remember when Hollywood made films like HELL OR HIGH WATER?"