War Pony

(Gina Gammell & Riley Keough, USA, 2022)

The directorial debut of Gina Gammell and actor Riley Keough (American Honey [2017], Zola [2021], season 1 [2016] of The Girlfriend Experience) is a sharply realistic, observational drama set in America’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Its protagonists, although sharing the same, small world, do not, at first, know each other. Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder) is a young teenager, while Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) is approaching adulthood, and already has fathered two children by different women.

Their daily problems, while quite different in nature, revolve around the same local ills: poverty, unemployment, dysfunctional families, and exploitation by the dominant, white culture (cue the usual uglification caricatures).

The travails of a local dog – kin to the wounded bird in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up (2022)! – bring an unwieldly, weird note of pathos to proceedings.

The film restlessly intercuts its twin trajectories. The directors for the most part eschew the flashy techniques of contemporary TV series drama in this regard. A montage-with-song sequence, for instance, is held back for a full 50 minutes; and a relatively conventional music score juices the tension only in the closing act.

Above all, War Pony shows the central characters and their peers as fundamentally disconnected from the language, culture and spirituality of their Lakota heritage – although they do experience fleeting, mystical visions (of buffalo, among other things) that might serve to put them on another path. The film often returns to an alluring Book of Magic – evoking, in a down-to-earth way, the airy, New Age, eco-spiritual vibe that infused season 1 (2013) of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake project.

At first, the spectacle of disaffected teenagers hanging out, taking drugs or robbing cars and homes (during Halloween!) recalls the work of Larry Clark, and especially his Marfa Girl films – although without his usual emphasis on sexuality. Touches of everyday, off-kilter grotesquerie (such as the wearing of masks) and perverse humour also fleetingly echo a former Clark collaborator, namely Harmony Korine in his trailer-trash mode.

Gammell and Keough’s aim is ultimately less sensational and more optimistic than either the Clark-Korine or Andrea Arnold-Janicza Bravo schools of grunge Americana. The script for the project arose from a close collaboration with two members of this community, Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy, as well as lengthy improvisations with the non-professional cast.

The overall ambience is bleak and deliberately meandering, but War Pony ultimately strives for a spiritual, indigenous perspective. Weighed down by so much naturalism, it’s only semi-successful in this transcendental quest. A suitably stirring if irresolute tone is truck with the song borrowed for the final credits: Buffy Sainte-Marie’s tersely melancholic 1965 folk hit, “Until It’s Time for You to Go”.

© Adrian Martin 19 October 2022