A treat of the visual art form

It's pretty rare that, even with as many good films we see at the Michigan/State Theaters, we hit it out of the park two weeks in a row. I still haven't written anything about The Good Boss, but I will get to it. But I had to immediately sit down and write something about God's Country, because it was simply that good. (Admittedly, I also wanted to test out the keyboard of the new machine I picked up with something a little lengthier than a tweet. So far, so good.) You've probably seen me comment about film being a visual medium and, consequently, the best of them letting the visuals tell the story. This is the key behind many of my favorites, like Rashomon and Blade Runner (the director's cut.) When you have a good director and someone great behind the camera, you can take a short story, as this film did, and make it blossom into something far greater than originally presented. When we first saw the trailer for Country a couple weeks ago, I was interested, but kind of dreading the "outsider dealing with the locals until the violence of justice erupts" premise that it implied. We've seen that many times before. But this film was something far greater and far more interesting than that simple (and often simplistic) approach. There was a depth of character and story here that meant much more than just another Dirty Harry pastiche, where the bad guys get what was comin' to'em, no matter what the law says.

The roots of Thandiwe Newton's character go far beyond the simple setting. We're presented with a college professor at a small school out in the hinterlands who has just lost her mother and is entering the holiday season at the end of the term still wrestling with her sorrow and now being confronted by a couple of local hunters who want free rein on her land; possibly because she's a she, an academic, is Black, but mostly because all of the above makes her an outsider to 'Merica. But the impact of her recent loss goes beyond a child losing their last and strongest link to family, as we slowly discover that Sandra isn't just an "outsider" from cosmopolitan New Orleans now in the backcountry, but that she and her mother were present during the most traumatic event of the city's existence, when Katrina struck in 2005. That sense of loss and anguish; for herself, for her mother, for the people that she knew ("born and raised") colors everything about Sandra's character and how she deals with everyone from the too-casual sheriff's deputy (Jeremy Bobb) to her too-comfortable colleague at the university (Joris Jarsky) to said colleague's beleaguered assistant (Tanaya Beatty.) There's been a recent surge in stories about the survivors of Katrina and the enormous psychological impact it had on them and everyone in and around New Orleans. For many outside the city, the disaster was over as soon as we stopped hearing about the toxic FEMA trailers ("You're doin' a great job, Brownie!") But for those who were there, it persists and those stories need to be told (HBO's Katrina Babies is a good recent example.)

On the face of it, that sounds like something that could easily become overloaded with emotion and it is a dramatic film. There's a lot of tension in the air, even when not dealing with the eminently hostile locals and their guns. But it's also a patient film that is willing to tell its story slowly which gives its characters and story room to breathe and, in some ways, even contributes tension to scenes that would otherwise be mundane. What keeps everything moving is, quite literally, the camera. Julian Higgins' direction and Andrew Wheeler's cinematography are both spectacular. Again, we're given the opportunity to see the story happen, rather than have it told to us. When Sandra enters her bedroom, we don't see her face and then drop to the dog she notices, sprawled on its bed. We start at the dog's level, seeing her feet enter before she drops into our frame of reference. When she confronts one of the locals and he threateningly invites her inside and then slowly pursues her to her car, we don't get an orchestral crash that signals something ominous. We just get the rush of movement that is then interrupted by the blaring noise of a passing train. When Sandra angrily opens a long-sealed box from her closet, none of it happens on-camera with her hands working ominously and the object of her search rising into the light. Instead, all of it happens behind the bed that she's crouching beside, as the intensity of her action and our supposition about what she's after are already telling us what we need to know.

The framework for all of this is one of faith and belief or the lack thereof; in oneself, in one's community, in the societal structures that elevate some and confine others. It's not difficult to see where the film likely departed from the boundaries of the short story it's based on, James Lee Burke's "Winter Light." But those departures are necessary to showcase a larger and more complex character study that needs the little moments of every day life and how they have different meaning to everyone involved and how each day contains events of magnitude, whether obvious or not. The original story is one of coming to grips with the modern ethics around masculinity. This story is about everything except that and it's a better insight into the modern state of society which is contrasted with the slower-changing world that Sandra finds herself in. This is one person's experience of endings and then transformation, rather than simply the creation in seven days which is the arc of presentation. It's a well-acted, well-written, well-directed film that is the complete package of what you'd hope to get whenever you sat down in a theater. Can't recommend it highly enough.