Haley Lu Richardson plays the prickly, sorrowful Erin in Montana Story
Montana Story (2021)
This movie turns “slow build” into a fine art. For a good half hour, compelling as its sweeping Montana backdrop was, within all those spaces I couldn’t get my emotional bearings. Once I did, the story made grand, humbling sense. It takes you out of yourself, into splendid vistas of the American West. Then it plunges you back into the darkest spaces of the inner life, that landscape where secrets live, fester, and wait to be sprung.
We’re on a stately but forbidding homestead/ranch. Mountains and stark cloudless skies loom in the background. Cal (Owen Teague), a worried look on his face, has come from Cheyenne to sell off the family holdings. His dying father lies in the house in a coma, breathing through a mask, unable to speak.
Cal looks at his father not with a son’s tenderness but from a chilly distance. The old man is being cared for by a calm, soft spoken Nigerian nurse, Ace (Gilbert Owuor). Gentle and forbearing as Ace is, we can see an understanding of family trauma in reserve in the back of his eyes.
Soon Cal’s half-sister Erin (Haley Lu Richardson) arrives, and she is cool and remote toward her brother and Ace, making it clear that she doesn’t want to be there. She can’t bear even to look at her dying father. Cal has asked her to help him dispose of the ruinously mortgaged house, to resettle the cattle and horses that remain, and, for however long they can bear it, to watch their father die.
Erin, having seen enough, shortly announces that she’s immediately returning home to upstate New York, where she’s built a life as a chef. But then one of the animals on the ranch exerts an unexpected pull on her. A beloved 25-year-old horse named “Mr. T.” is nearing the end of its days, and Cal, reluctantly, is going to have this whinnying symbol of both siblings’ youth put down. Erin, surprising herself, tells Cal she won’t allow it. She vows to take the aged horse with her back to New York.
This unplanned act of defiance means that Erin has to remain at her childhood home a bit longer. She and Cal are then forced to look into their estrangement from one another and from their father.
Owen Teague portrays the brooding, haunted Cal in Montana Story
What stirs the movie to life and lends it increasing power is the terrain itself. As Erin and Cal drive through the surrounding area, the immensity of the Montana vistas swallows them up. The two of them grew up here, so they talk, ride around, and argue with one another against a grand national folk space, with an ease that impresses us as we watch. But we also sense the unsettling questions that they seem to be sidestepping. In this Blue-Sky vastness, can everything be escaped, forgotten, or forgiven?
Scott McGehee and David Siegel both wrote and directed this bitterly intimate family drama, whose snow-capped mountains keep us enthralled and wondering: Why have Cal and Erin fled this natural grandeur? Giles Nuttgens neatly brings off the handsome, never postcard-pretty, cinematography, and Isaac Hagy pins down emotions with subtle, devastating editing.
The three lead actors are compelling. Teague makes the lanky Cal seem childlike and lost, needing from his father and Erin a recognition he’s never gotten. Richardson is marvelously ornery as Erin, who won’t give an inch in her resentment of her family’s mistreatment of her. Until, that is, a moment arrives when the family, including her father, can’t do without her. Owuor as Ace performs an artful balancing act. He’s profoundly an outsider, not from this world. Yet as a trained nurse he’s long since learned to read the undercurrents of illness and the old wounds it can rip open when a family least expects it.
This movie brings off the unusual feat of going big visually while preparing the way to go small and dig into the heart of hurt. I came away with a respect for all three people at its center, summoning their best, not letting anguish keep them from finally taking a larger view. It turns out that those majestic mountain prospects can help to keep hope, even when it’s nearly crushed, beating.