Texas is a violent place. It doesn’t matter whether you form your
opinions through current affairs and broadcast news, or gritty cinema; there is
clearly a lot of violence in Texas.
Bobby (Jeremy Allen White) is a high school graduate about to fulfill his
dream of escaping the rural farmland and heading to the big city with his best
friend Sue (Mackenzie Davis), whom
he secretly loves. The only problem is
that Sue is dating his other best friend B.J. (Logan Huffman), who is being left behind to work on the farm with
the aggressive thug Giff (Mark
Pellegrino).
Before they go away, B.J. convinces his
two friends to travel to Mexico for a last big holiday. Only when they return home he admits that he
stole the money to pay for it from Giff.
When Giff finds out (in an amazingly tense scene) he tells them that
they must steal from local racketeers in order to pay him back. B.J. then concocts a ‘foolproof’ plan that
comes under strain when he suspects his two friends of hiding a secret from
him…
The Texas that is depicted onscreen fits
alongside a number of nouveaux-cowboy noir-thrillers set in the rural South such
as Shotgun Stories, The Killer Inside Me and more recently Cold
in July. They all have the
similar colour pallete of sun bleached sepia and cold blues, the same drunken
violence and the same small-town criminal networks of armed thugs.
At the heart of the film there is a
juxtaposition between the cultured metropolitan ambition of Sue and Bobby, expressed
through their love of literature and interest in higher education, and the primitive
and rural B.J. and Giff who are labourers of the land and are never going to
leave the small town. Amongst the cruel
violence that plays out on screen, the film has a clear moral hierarchy that
favours one group over the other.
There is also another binary at work
towards the later stages of the film in amongst the organized criminals as the
principle gangster clashes with the amoral thug. Another familiar suggestion that brains beats
brawn.
Some of the motifs are heavily borrowed
from early Tarantino, especially the pop-culture conversations in the diner and
the retro credits from the beginning, but the by the end a clear individuality
has emerged from the family team of Zeke
and Simon Hawkins.
We Gotta Get Out Of This Place premiered
at the Edinburgh Film Festival, opens in cinema on the 15th August and is on DVD 8th September
No comments:
Post a Comment