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.
Tabatha coaches her teenage strays on the fine arts of acrobatic tricks while riding, often without saddles, as a means of goosing bids from dubious ranchers during the raucous horse auctions and rodeos that occupy considerable screen time.
Although Porshia is her most gifted “student” — a true force of nature, when riding hard — their relationship is strained, following the unexpected death of Tabatha’s husband, John (the circumstances of which aren’t revealed until a gripping scene in the third act). Via typical teenage self-centeredness, Porshia can’t forgive her mother for having failed to confront John’s death, or properly process — and share — her grief.
“She won’t even say his name,” Porshia bitterly complains, at one point.
This rag-tag family unit is augmented by Tabatha’s tough-talking mother Tracey (Jennifer Ehle), rarely seen without a cigarette and mason jar filled with hooch. She gets one of the film’s best one-liners, when — during a discussion of hardship and bad luck — Ehle puts hard-eyed anger into Tracey’s observation that “It’s bad luck being a woman.”
The impressively kind and patient Clay (Clay Pateneaude) also is a steady fixture, as Tabatha’s live-in partner and boyfriend; he understands when to stay out of her way. He also helps raise Tabatha’s 3-year-old son Stetson (Stetson Neumann), apparently stricken with delayed-speech issues.
(Just what they need, right?)
Unfortunately, despite all the training, effort and horse-ring showmanship by Tabatha’s fearless riders, she never gets more than $2,000 per sale: nowhere near enough to cover ranch expenses, let alone settle an ever-mounting debt at the local grocery store.
Beecroft takes her time (too much of it, I’d argue) introducing the story’s primary conflict. That’s Roy Waters (Scoot McNairy), a wealthy Forth Worth rancher who swoops in and eventually offers Tabatha a financial lifeline: He’ll buy her ranch, allowing her operation to “continue as before,” knowing that her well-trained horses will fetch much higher auction prices when backed by his name and reputation.
The rub, of course, is that Tabatha will be working for him: a distinction that immediately rubs Clay the wrong way.
Sidebar issues include Tabatha’s effort to become the legal guardian of Jesse (Jesse Thorson), a disillusioned and aimless teen lacking any other competent family members; it’s also clear that Jesse and Ryder (Chancey Ryder Witt) are sweet on each other. But nothing comes of that relationship, and — despite several sequences of all the teens enjoying themselves during moments of play — we never learn anything about Skylar (Wyatt Mansfield), Leanna (Leanna Shumpert) or Brynn (Brynn Darling).
As it turns out, Roy also has insufficiently addressed emotional baggage, but this erupts almost as an afterthought. On top of which, he improbably vanishes during a large chunk of the film’s second half.
By this point, having clocked the many duplicate character and performer names, you’ve realized that — of the entire cast — only Ehle and McNairy are professional actors; all the others are first-time performers. That works for Tabatha and Porshia, who excel at conveying emotion via silent, brooding expressions ... but not so much, for many of the others.
That said, a late-night revelatory scene, with half a dozen older women baring their souls after getting half-smashed, is impressively powerful. Everybody involved is excellent, but Tabatha Zimiga owns the moment.
Beecroft builds her story to a satisfying — if unsurprising — conclusion, but you may wonder if the ride was worth it. Too much of her film feels as wild and untamed as these horses.
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