Americana (2023)
We still well remember, and not with any great fondness, the sheer avalanche of 'Pulp Fiction' knockoffs that flooded film festivals, theaters and video stores throughout the second half of the 1990's and into the 2000's.....
You know the drill......quirky hit-men, goons and assorted weirdos firing off snappy repartee filled with pop culture references.....until they all pull out guns and wipe each other out in a cloud of blood squibs. Feel free to yawn deeply......
Writer-director Tony Tost draws deeply from that shallow well of tropes, also throwing in a liberal helping of subversive Coen Brothers dry humor.
Normally, every instinct would lead us to hate this movie for its derivative origins....
But we didn't.
In his feature film debut, Tost proves he has the unflinching eye of a visualist director, coupled with a firm grasp of character development.
Even more surprising, we found a warm, humanist streak of sentimentality that you'd never, ever catch sight of in the unforgiving universes of Quentin and the Coens.
Tost fills his wide screen with the expansive landscapes of South Dakota...(actually New Mexico). Abused and fed up Mandy (pop singer Halsey, not bad at all) knocks out her petty crook boyfriend Dillon(Eric Dane) and takes off in his muscle car......but not with her strange young son Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), obsessed with Native American culture and convinced he's Sitting Bull reincarnated. Rolling back the timeline a few days, we see Dillon had previously stolen a highly valued Lakota tribal 'ghost shirt' and stuffed it in the trunk of that muscle car, unbeknownst to Mandy.
Naturally there's a parallel storyline, involving gentle soft spoken Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser, one this film's MVPs). A lonely war veteran, Lefty repeatedly makes awkward marriage proposals to his first dates, including shy stuttering waitress Penny Jo (Sydney Sweeney, achingly sweet, a forever deer-in-the-headlights).
Lefty and Penny Jo get wind of the stolen ghost shirt, so they follow Mandy, who as a last resort, has taken refuge with her estranged father Hiram (Christopher Kriesa). And here's where the film ups its voyage into Krazy Tarantino-land... with Hiram living like a quietly demented cult leader, surrounded by gun-toting minions and ruling over his enslaved wife and daughters like a 19th century frontier Patriarch, dressing them up like the cast of 'Little House on the Prairie'.
And then a host of characters converge on Hiram's compound......Lakota tribal members who've heard from Cal about the stolen ghost shirt, Lefty and Penny Jo, and lethal thug Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) whom Dillan had enlisted in the theft and sale of that priceless Native artifact.
Bullets fly freely and very few cast members are left standing......
What kept us constantly glued to this movie, as opposed to those dreary, unwatchable 1990's fake Tarantino copycats, was creator Tost's obvious care and affection for his characters. And his ability to slow the movie down to spend some quality time with them. (He's enormously aided by the expert playing of odd couple Hauser and Sweeney, who know to make a scene both heartbreaking and funny at the same time.)
Okay, maybe all of it doesn't quite hold together the way it should, and sure, the tone's wildly uneven, but anybody who savors adventurous independent cinema will find plenty to enjoy here. And find it well worth a viewing.
BQ did. And we damn well look forward to whatever Tony Tost comes up with next.
3 stars (***).
