Writer/director Kate Beecroft’s feature debut, although heartfelt and at times achingly poignant, nonetheless is challenging on several levels.
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| Porshia (Porshia Zimiga, left) considers her future, during an uncharacteristically calm moment, while housemates Leanna (Leanna Shumpert, center) and Brynn (Brynn Darling) provide quiet company. |
No surprise, since leads Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga essentially play themselves; Beecroft lived with them for three years, while assembling her film.
The result very strongly belongs in the company of similarly probing, naturalistic dramas such as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.
Unfortunately, Beecroft’s script doesn’t sufficiently flesh out the large cluster of supporting characters. We too often wonder where our attention should be directed, and why.
Matters also aren’t helped by the fact that Tabatha, although ethical and trying to “do the right thing” as best she can, is such a strikingly unpalatable individual: heavily tattooed and pierced, with her blond hair half-sheared in a warrior’s buzz cut. She’s also short-tempered, impatient and relentlessly profane.
Ah, but Tabatha has a special talent. She’s a gifted horse-whisperer, and has kept food on the table by training animals either captured in the wild, or rescued from kill pens. She’s also able to sense and diagnose what’s wrong with an ailing animal.
Tabatha and her teenage daughter Porshia live on a 3,000-acre, broken-down ranch adjacent to South Dakota’s Badlands, east of the flyspeck community of Wall (population 699, as of the 2020 census). They share their home with an ever-changing gaggle of teenagers who’ve run away; been abandoned by parents impoverished, incarcerated or dead; or simply left to fend for themselves.
It becomes clear that the women in this hard-scrabble community are particularly challenged: often the abused punching bags of husbands, boyfriends and fathers who — frustrated by their inability to find work — lash out at the nearest target.
