Premise: In the final days of her probation, a woman gets pulled back into the drug selling and transporting that got her in trouble before in order to help her sister.
I enjoy a good Neo-Western. My lizard brain has a very narrow definition of a Western that says they can only take place in the Southwest U.S. from about 1860-1910 or so. They need Cowboys and/or Indians. There should be sheriffs, outlaws, and gunslingers with no name. You know the drill. It's a much wider genre than that though. There are Westerns set in other countries or other time periods. AFI sums it up well by describing the genre as being about the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier. So, Neo or Contemporary Westerns end up being about people living on the fringe of society. Movies like No Country For Old Men, Hell or High Water, and Wind River. While I have no desire to live in these worlds, I think there is something comforting about being reminded that no matter where or when you are, it's still very possible to live an unplugged life. It didn't occur to me when I picked it, but Little Woods is definitely a Neo-Western, only it's set up in North Dakota. I like cold Westerns. There's a miserable quality to them. Like, the characters are barely tapped into society AND they have to wear a coat.
I obviously picked this movie because it had Tessa Thompson and Lily James. Thompson's career has been fun to follow, because even though she looks like Tessa Thompson, she seems to favor gruff or prickly characters, like she's showing up to the same casting calls as Karl Urban. Best of all, she totally works as those characters. I'm a Lily James fan too, even though I can't quite pin down what I like about her. She was a good Cinderella. She was appropriately effervescent as young Meryl Streep in the Mamma Mia sequel. She hit the right notes in Baby Driver, Darkest Hour, and Yesterday. I'm sure some part of why I like her is simply because I like seeing pretty people on screen. I wish I had a go-to performance of hers to point to though.
I wish more filmmakers would take a note from this movie with how they handled Thompson and James playing sisters. There's one quick line about Thompson being adopted and that's all I needed. I had no problem treating them as sisters for the rest of the movie and it wasn't at all distracting. I don't know if that was in the script already or if it was added to explain the casting. Either way, it totally works. I'd also like to extend the same logic to allowing characters to use their natural accents. Obviously, it wouldn't work in some movies. It wouldn't make sense for Lily James to have an English accent here, but many other movies could throw in one line like "I moved here from England" and eliminate the distraction of bad accent-work.
I should probably talk about the actual movie a little, right? I mostly liked it. I liked the dynamic between James and Thompson. They are both screw-ups but in different and complimentary ways. While, they are get involved in a lot of illegal activities, the movie actually hinges on their relationship. Writer/director Nia DaCosta could've built the climax around crossing the border from Canada back into the US. The stakes of that are plenty high with Thompson still on probation and James potentially losing her son. Instead, that part ends up being an afterthought. The emotional climax of the movie is actually their talk the night before when they come to terms with Thompson leaving for that job in Washington. The movie had plenty of criminal underworld stuff before that, so that was a nice shift at the end.
I do think the movie turns the screws a little too much overall. Each individual complication seems fine in a vacuum (still on probation, selling drug again, having to cut Luke Kirby in, the trailer getting towed, someone raiding the trailer before Thompson could, not having a proper fake Canadian ID), but all of it combined felt like a bit much. One big thing going wrong feels more believable than 10 small things going wrong. Overall, a solid movie though. It's cool that DaCosta was able to turn this into making the new Candyman movie and the next Captain Marvel movie.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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