GGiving great credibility to guys of a certain age – and probably aimed at them too – this dark thriller lands squarely in Coen brothers territory and does a creditable job there. Set in the mid-’90s and starring actor Scoot McNairy as veteran salesman Cliff, flogging defibrillators on the northwest stretch of Interstate 90, it packs just enough bedroom sociological charge to open the American sternum.
Cliff’s cardiology work comes to a halt when his buyers catch wind of his involvement in a scam at a previous job that resulted in the suicide of an accomplice. Unable to find more work, he ends up with his racing buddy Ricky (Kit Harington, sporting a fearsome handlebar spot), who recruits him for the local cocaine trade. Read the demanding terms and conditions With his face pressed against a table by kingpin John (Josh Lucas) and chaperoned by one of his henchmen, Cliff is tasked with running a few bricks of drugs down the highway and returning with the money.
In this snowy purgatory, rendered with oppressive torpor by director Rod Blackhurst in the film’s opening scenes, selling is the great American addiction and the cure. “Selling the possibility of a death that might never happen is a tough sell,” Ricky says of defibrillators (and that’s not a bad definition of film noir’s existential tendencies, either). Their trade is fundamentally rooted in lies, believes this fundamentally corrupt free cannon. But Cliff thinks the sale spreads hope; this is how he justifies his breakup while his wife (Nora Zehetner), with whom he lost a child, is not aware of his movements.
With the two men holed up for the end of the game in an empty housing complex – the symbolic redoubt of American hopes – Blackhurst fails to conclude his diagnosis of the state of the nation in any form more substantial than a gunfight at the old one. But there are intuitive flashes of a cynical worldview in his creation of sharp images (like the opening shot of a blood-splattered family portrait) and harsh dialogue delivered by the admirably jaded McNairy. His gaunt fizzog has more and more something of American Gothic painting; a good choice for this hazardous outing on the country’s financial frontier.
theguardian