Hell or High Water

The last song articulates the film’s “spirit of the outlaw.” In this modern-age western the entire West Texas world is a bunch of outlaws: the banks whose usurious system would sweep the oil-rich ranch out from under the dead woman’s grandsons, the diners who don’t recognize the robbers, the trigger-happy customers who turn a heist into a slaughter, the waitress who resents losing the robber’s $200 tip that she needs to keep a roof over her daughter’s mortgaged head. America is now this small town were the common people can't make an honest living.

And so to the central quartet. Two brothers face off against two lawmen. 
      Toby is the good son determined to improve the lot of his two abandoned sons and ex-wife by robbing the Texas Midland branches to get the money to pay off the Texas Midland reverse mortgage and back taxes. He recruits his wilder ex-con brother Tanner. 
      Both brothers are scarred.Tanner was jailed for having murdered his abusive father. His service in Afghanistan left him the sniper skills to wage guerrilla warfare against the troopers. Toby hung back, failed his wife and sons when he served his mother. In the hotel scene Toby sleeps alone in the foreground while Tanner has loud sex with a call girl behind, having chased off Toby's prospect in the casino. Tanner's sacrifice at the end makes him again the crazy doer, Toby safer with his detached abstemiousness.

The brothers’ bond bristles with insults, parallelling that between Sheriff Marcus and his Indian/Mexican deputy Alberto. Exulting in political incorrectness, Marcus teases Alberto about his ethnic background. In return Alberto razzes his senior about his looming retirement. As even poetic justice is blind, the wilder outlaw and the tamer lawman are both killed.

Though Toby and Marcus survive, their success stays shadowed. In their last scene both appear dramatically cleaned-up, healthier versions of their earlier presentation. Marcus made it through a gun-happy society’s law system to retire. Toby has ensured his sons’ fortunes by saving and passing on the oil-rich farm. 

But neither man knows peace. As Marcus senses (or as a moral man, needs to believe), Toby is haunted by his brother’s death and the deaths of the bank-folk incidental to their robberies. He also remains an outsider in his own family, coldly dismissed by his ex-wife, kept at a proper distance by his more promising sons. 
     Marcus remains trapped by the incompletely solved case. How can he prove Toby was the second robber? How did Toby plan it all and get away with it? And why did the brothers score small bank heists when their family farm was oil-rich? The depths of widower Marcus’s grief and anger are suggested when he tells Toby of the large family Alberto left behind.

In the last scene Marcus gratefully accepts Toby’s invitation to continue their conversation at his home in town. There they may find “peace.” We’re not told what that “peace” means for each of them, if either will get it, or how. 

Perhaps Toby’s “peace” would be avenging Tanner’s death and dispatching the ex-sheriff’s implicit threat to his scheme — or it might be making the final sacrifice for his sons and going down in gunfire. Perhaps Marcus’s “peace” would be solving that last case and bringing the robber to justice — or it might be his last shoot-out heroically to escape the torpor of retirement. It’s a Mexican standoff.

In the last shot Marcus drives off, disappearing into the countryside as the camera drops into the wheat. That movement implies burial, as if an augur of the final shoot-out that even a modern-day Western sets us up to expect.  But that reading is inflected by the reflection of a triangle of light on the left side of the screen. The light changes that burial to resurrection. Perhaps the two heroes’ “peace” will therefore rather be putting the antagonistic past behind them and getting on with their lives. 
      That reading is supported by the film's opening shot -- the empty dusty town with Afghanistan graffiti on an outside wall. The two shots frame the film with a movement from a depressed and sterile town to a blowing field, with vegetation and perhaps hope.  The first shot leads into the brothers' bank robbery. The last leaves the ambiguity of its post-narrative conclusion, whether another assault or a truce.

The latter would make this a new age Western, which prefers a negotiated compromise over violence. That emphasizes Marcus' and Toby's sensitive, female side, coherent with their later cleaned-up, more civilized look. That would also balance the tough flatness of the film’s women, all consigned to the margin: Toby’s hardened wife, the fleshy single-mom waitress who’s drawn to him, his casino pickup, and the waitress who for forty years has been serving up only t-bone steaks, the only option being peas or corn. 

The title comes from the lawyer’s instruction: Come hell or high water the heroes have to get the cash to the bank to avoid the foreclosure. The absence of high water is evident in the arid Texas landscape and the tired bodies that move bent and broken and hopeless through it. Even the vegetation is a pallid yellow. Only an Eastern city slicker would order trout in these parts. 
     As for the hell, it’s what the people live, helpless before the banks, hopeless in their cycle of generations of poverty, with only the rare opportunity to make the one score that may be too late for them but just might spring free their kids.  Even Toby's happy ending may be limited. As the two pumps suck oil out of the desert we remember that even that prize has been drained of its old value in recent days. Oil is the earth's gift sans fertility, sans growth, sans cleanliness and even itself doomed to obsolescence.
     This circle of hell might well be the Trump supporters, on the fringe of the economy and the law, so hopeless they’ll bet it all on an irrational, even lunatic long-shot.