Tag Archives: Wes Studi

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I Believe I Can Fly

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Mending the Line

by George Wolf

Mending the Line certainly has its heart in the right place. It gives us wounded warriors and grieving souls, all finding some peace for battered psyches through the Zen of fly fishing.

There are some beautiful and serene Montana landscapes, and a message of caring respect that’s easy to get behind.

It’s also smart to get behind it, because anything in front of that message is in the path of some dramatic box-checking with little thought of subtlety.

Marine Sgt. John Colter (Sinqua Walls from the recent White Men Can’t Jump remake and next week’s The Blackening) is making good progress on recovering physically from a deadly firefight in Afghanistan. “Colt”‘s mental state is more fragile, as he’s plagued by memories of losing good men on their final tour before coming home.

Their final tour. And Colt’s best friend in the Corps was about to be married. And Colt was to be the Best Man.

Colt wants to get back to the front lines asap, but his V.A. Dr. (Patricia Heaton) isn’t sure his head is right, so she sends him to see old Ike Fletcher for fly fishing lessons.

Ike (Bryan Cox) is a battle-scarred Vet himself, and begrudgingly puts Colt through some Mr. Miyagi-approved training while Colt gets to know the locals. There’s Lucy (Perry Mattfeld), who’ still mourning the loss of her fiancé, while Harrison (Wes Studi) is the requisite best friend who needles Ike about what an old coot he is before imparting a nugget of wisdom and walking off.

The cast is fine, and director Joshua Caldwell follows up the in-your-face cliche fest of his Infamous with a appropriately gentler hand, but Stephen Camelio’s debut screenplay offers more good intention than authentic emotion.

Pivotal changes of heart land suddenly without being earned, while the heavy-handed plot turns walk hand in hand with Bill Brown’s paint-by-melodramatic-numbers score.

Veterans care, survivor’s guilt and life after trauma are worthy issues, and Mending the Line wants badly to respect those involved and provide enlightenment for the conversation.

The respect is never in doubt, but the conversation ends up treading water.

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Coming of Age

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A Love Song

by Hope Madden

Filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman’s feature debut A Love song blesses us with 81 minutes of Dale Dickey, a gorgeous western landscape, and not much else. It is enough.

Dickey is Faye, a solitary figure with a face full of longing at Campsite 7. She sets her crawdad traps, makes her coffee, studies birds and their calls by day, stars and their positions by night, and waits.  

Dickey’s performance is a master class in authenticity, as always. She’s been the grizzled Appalachian or the kindly townsfolk in countless films and shows. Rather than hide the years that stretch across her face, she looks out from behind them, eyes bright and observing. She wears a lifetime of experience, and that, along with her instinctive natural performances, creates depth and richness.

All that and more is called for in Walker-Silverman’s film because for about 80% of its running time, we’re alone with Faye and witness to Dickey’s achingly real performance.

Faye’s solitude is broken up here and there. A friendly couple a few campsites over invite her for dinner. An odd group of siblings arrives with a peculiar request. A kindly and encouraging mailman stops by.

Eventually, Faye’s patience pays off in the form of her childhood friend, Lito (Wes Studi). Decades of absence and years of meaning stand between Lito’s charming smile and Faye’s searching eyes.

There’s magic and nostalgia for old-fashioned love stories in Walker-Silverman’s script, but these veteran actors don’t bend to sentiment. Both know how to blend innocence with renewal, reimagining coming-of-age as they do.

Walker-Silverman’s camera lights on visual metaphors: hearty wildflowers bursting through dried earth, a transistor radio that always seems to know what to play. His film brims with the kind of beauty and type of characters reminiscent of Chloé Zhao’s work, but A Love Song is more meditative. It’s beautiful, touching and real.

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Hostiles

by Hope Madden

Hey, Christian Bale and Ben Foster are in another Western. Remember how fun 3:10 to Yuma was?!

Well, writer/director Scott Cooper is a very serious man. If there is one thing you won’t call his films—Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass and his latest, Hostiles—it’s a laugh riot.

Hostiles is a morose Western with too-obvious intentions. Thanks to Bale and cinematographer Mesanobu Takayanagi, though, the result is a graceful if revisionist image. With Takayanagi’s help, Cooper recalls the best of John Ford’s The Searchers, and with Bale’s help he rectifies its worst.

Facing retirement from a lifetime of warring with Native Americans across the West, Capt. Joseph Blocker (Bale) has one final assignment: escort the ailing Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family back to Montana so he can die with his people.

After many years of hatred and resentment toward Native Americans in general and Yellow Hawk in particular, Blocker wants no part in this “parade.” But he is a good soldier.

The journey offers opportunities for many an adventure, the first of which is the meeting of homesteader Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike). Blocker’s party finds her in her burned-out home, but we already know what happened thanks to the profoundly brutal attack that opened the film.

Over the course of the film’s 133-minute running time, lessons are learned, each one coming at a very bloody cost. Though Bale and most of the supporting players deliver quietly devastating performances, their arcs feel more than forced. They feel patronizing.

Mainly that’s because the Native American actors have no such arcs. Studi, along with Adam Beach, Tanaya Beatty, Q’orianka Kilcher and Xavier Horsechief—the prisoners—are one-dimensional beings of pure wisdom, compassion and nobility.

Which is no doubt preferable to the being nameless, bloodthirsty monsters that stand in for Apache characters.

Cooper sets his tale at a bitter transition in American history when civilization was beginning to overtake the Wild West and people like Blocker were no longer sure of their purpose, no longer comfortable with their past. Like Blocker, Cooper seems determined to right a wrong but, again like his character, he doesn’t seem to know quite how to do it.