Montana Story

dirs.: Scott McGehee & David Siegel

2021

A grim story. A grim family story, one without easy answers, catharsis or readily accessible “closure”.

Life’s just like that, I guess.

I am sure there were always lots of movies above people’s parents dying, about both that end of life care and people trying to resolve the unresolvable. I notice it more, these days, having lost both of my parents now. So I go into these kinds of filmic experiences both with dread and with some kind of eagerness to maybe see some aspects of my experiences represented, or maybe those of my dad.

Let me just say I saw none of my experiences mirrored or reflected here, but that’s not a bad thing. This is such a particular story about two estranged siblings (more so than the dying father), and it’s not even about trying to both provide care to a dying tyrant and argue about stuff that happened years before.

I realise when I watch flicks like this and they leave out most of what it’s actually like to look after a bedbound dying person, that no-one really wants to include those details, because maybe they’re too afraid that it would make the flick too depressing? For the two main people here, luckily for them they have a personal medical carer / attendant to actually do all the work (and it is so much work, believe me please) of keeping a dying comatose person relatively comfortable and clean all day and all night.

The carer tells people to call him Ace (Gilbert Owuor) because his Ethiopian name is too difficult for Americans to pronounce. He is there not only to free up time for the two siblings, being Cal (Owen Teague) and Erin (Haley Lu Richardson) so that they can delay talking about what happened one fateful night 7 years ago, but also they can vent to him / make confession without absolution until they’re ready to confront each other.

They had different mothers, but the same father. Of the father, all we see is his face behind a mask, longish hair, but no apparent life other than what the beeping of nearby machines would imply. He can’t hurt them now, but the wounds he’s caused haven’t healed, and I saw no indication that they ever really will.

It’s not entirely clear cut, but though they are close in age, I think Cal is the younger of the two. He is nervous at the house, and around Erin in a way that takes a long time to understand. We get some idea of why he’s so freaked out at seeing Erin, but not the underlying truth of it all.

What we know is that he hasn’t seen her for seven years, even though he’s been looking. Erin had cut off all contact with him, but not with their father’s housekeeper, Valentina (Kimberley Guerrero), who has known all along but was sworn to secrecy. Valentina has a son Joey (Asivak Koostachin), who is also happy to see Erin, and whom Erin is apparently happy to see as well.

Far happier than seeing Cal.

As their father lays dying, Cal, who I guess is meant to be 23, is trying to deal with the logistical aspects of getting the family ranch ready for sale, and all the various other bits and pieces. Though it is a ranch in Montana, they were not ranchers themselves, and their terrible father wasn’t only a shitty and violent father, but shitty at his work too, so he’s broke.

I’m sure they addressed it, but I cannot fathom how they could afford Ace’s services when the ranch is so broke. His services would be worth a fortune. But anyway. Cal is selling everything he can, and the family’s last living horse, being Mr T, is set for the knackery.

Erin won’t have that. So she agitates and plans for a way to get Mr T to wherever it is she lives in upstate New York, which is pretty far away from Montana, I would think. To further this plan, she wants to buy a pick up truck and trailer, and she needs Cal to drive her there to pick them up.

On that drive, Cal nervously talks about his life, everything he’s done over the last seven years, where he lives, what he does, and it’s obviously in the spirit of giving Erin an opportunity to talk about her own life as well. He uses an almost cheery tone, but at no stage through listening to it do you get the impression that Cal thinks everything’s a-ok between them. He’s hoping that this could be a starting point.

On this drive, she just looks at him a few times, and says nothing. She says as much with her eyes as Cal says in fifteen minutes of jittery talking.

He gets nothing, shut down so cruelly. And yet, disappointed as he is, it seems like he thinks he deserves it.

So we start to think that maybe he does deserve it, a little bit, for whatever it is. The thing that happened, that is so terrible that they can only talk around it, is so terrible because it’s not even what their father did to her on that fateful night, or what he did to her horse, which was called Pepper (not Mr T, pointedly). They’re not dancing around it; they both know what happened, but they don’t know what toll it’s taken on the other for all these years.

One of the things it’s impossible to ignore in the flick other than the excruciating tension is the scenery. It’s so magnificently imposing, in almost every outside shot. Anywhere they are standing outside, there are massive snow-capped mountains looming in the distance, far enough away, but still close enough to be a threat. Does what happened to them have to do with the place itself?

Erin questions the whole “big sky” mythos and how it relates to people living and growing up in Montana. Maybe part of that mythology is used to excuse people’s worst behaviours, people’s worst moments, or to paper over them. I have to say because I don’t know what this mythos really is, I may not have completely understood what she meant, unless it’s a general Western myth people from that great state tell themselves about how great they are and how much better they are than those coastal elites and people who brush their teeth regularly. It might probably mean more to Americans than us pesky foreigners.

A myth I have far more familiarity with, or at least a classic bit of literature, is Dante’s Inferno. On a side trip when they’re on the way home, Cal and Erin drive to a mine, abandoned now, that played a part in their family’s downfall. This open cut stepped mine reminds Erin of the circles of hell, and she tries to articulate to Cal about how each level corresponds to a different type of sin, a different type of sinner, a different type of punishment.

And of course she speaks of the lowest level, the one reserved for betrayers – the betrayers of community, and of special relationships.

You don’t have to be a genius to know who she’s talking about. Even a clear non-genius like Cal knows who she’s talking about.

They reach a precipitous moment, during a storm, the lights and power go out, which is needed to keep their father alive. Ace does what he can in order to keep the old man oxygenated, but he needs Erin to literally keep the man alive while Cal is outside trying to start a generator.

Erin, just to clarify, has to keep alive the man that brought her so much misery that she loathes more than anything else on the planet.

Brother and sister finally say clearly the stuff that they did not want to say. And it doesn’t feel like catharsis. It doesn’t sound like prepared speeches. It doesn’t sound Shakespearean in the depths of its feeling or the breadth of its tragedy.

But it does sound wrenching, and deeply painful. And at least I had the strong impression that it couldn’t be undone, or made up for, or ever lessen in its intensity with the passage of time, or the imminent death of the bastard father. It just was and will be what it was, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that, because the past can’t be changed.

If it sounds all doom and gloom, well then, mission accomplished on my part, but it’s actually rendered with a light touch. It’s not a melodrama – it’s just a drama. People don’t even raise their voices or yell that much. They, the siblings, don’t even tear shreds off of each other: they just say how hurt they are, and it doesn’t feel overstated or overdone.

Maybe that it is in keeping with the Montana Big Sky ethos: people survive terrible things, but the mountains sit in judgement of what we do afterwards, always, and they will always find our petty ways foolish.

Montana Story is a deeply sad story about deeply sad siblings, and that’s okay. We need to be reminded, like we don’t have daily reminders, of how much families suck and how death is not always a release for the living. There’s so much grief here, and it’s not for the father.

Owen Teague is pretty solid as Calvin. Haley Lu Richardson is a revelation as Erin. She was magnificent. She does so much by doing so little for much of the running time, and watching her for the first time in something is like seeing Florence Pugh in the first time in something – it feels like a blessed moment.

8 times and the guy in the coma, he did some great coma acting out of 10

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“Every night I wake up and think “That can’t be what happened.” But that is what happened, and that’s how it’s always going to be.” - Montana Story