Men Who Wear Hats

The Writer of Sicario and Hell or High Water Returns With Another Crackling Modern Western. Hero to Be Determined

- Mary Kaye Schilling

IN THE FINAL moments of the film Hell or High Water, Sheriff Marcus Hamilton, played by Jeff Bridges, visits one of the brothers responsible for a string of bank robberies in several small, struggling towns of West Texas. After taking stock of what those acts have cost in lives, as well as what they have yielded for the brother and his family, Bridges chuckles: “The things we do for our kids, huh?”

The screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan, has a way with a wryly humorous and understated line. He came late to writing, but he came at it hard. The film Hell or High Water, only the second script he has written, was nominated for several Oscars, including best original screenplay (it was also 2016’s highest-grossing indie). His first script, Sicario, another critical and commercial smash, came out the year before. Sheridan’s latest, Wind River, he got to direct himself.

A loosely linked trilogy, the three films, all located in the modern American West, hold up a mirror to some very bad shit: Sicario centers on the militarization of the drug war in southern Arizona; Hell or High Water highlights the latest chapter in the multigenerational story of West Texas poverty, this one sparked by predatory loans; and Wind River addresses violence against Native American women on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation, a place of near-impossible conditions, natural and otherwise. “The films explore how much and how little has changed since the American West was settled, as well as the consequence of that settlement.” The reservations, he adds, are the most tangible remnant of that, “our country’s greatest shame.”