War Pony

16/11/2024

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Schemes, Plots and the Statistically Likely

What is cinema ethno-fiction? Some would see it chiefly in documentary, in works by anyone from Robert Flaherty to Jean Rouch — from the staged and planned documentaries that give the impression of fact offered by the former,or the more self-conscious even self-reflexive work by the latter. While Flaherty would stage the walrus hunt in Nanook of the North, Rouch makes us aware of the process by having those in Chronicle of a Summer commenting on the made film at the end of its screening — which itself becomes part of the film. 

Yet what interests us here is contemporary fiction films made with an ethnographic base, where the narrative comes fictionally out of a given community: Atanarjuat: The Distance Runner, Winter’s Bone, A Ciambra, Fancy Dance, War Pony and others. To varying degrees the films rely on the active engagement of the community it focuses upon; sometimes behind the camera; sometimes in front of it. 90 per cent of the crew behind Atanarjuat were Inuit, while in A Ciambra, the director spent six years visiting a Romani community as he was determined to offer ethnographic accuracy. “Every time [director Jonas] Carpignano would meet with the Amatos, he took detailed notes of their interactions and stories, naturally told in gregarious fashion, ultimately channelling them into a narrative around one of the youngest members of the family.” (The Moveable Feast) The cast were nonprofessionals from the community playing versions of themselves. Speaking of Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik said, “we knew it had to be there, it had to have local people populating the film visually. There is no chance that this film would come to life in any way that would be close to the book—or close to any anthropological sense of precision—unless we did it there.’ (NPR)

       Sometimes the films will have the community as a backdrop but will be cast professionally. Winter Bone has John Hawke in a key supporting role and its lead, Jennifer Lawrence, has become a major Hollywood star. In Fancy Dance, Lily Gladstone is very much playing a character that wouldn’t be alien to her: a woman living on an Indian reservation looking out for her niece. Gladstone was brought up on Blackfleet in Montana, though the film is set on the Seneca Cayuga reservation in Missouri, where the director Erica Tromblay was brought up. But Gladstone is also now a star, appearing in Certain Women and Killer of the Flower Moons. Fancy Dance also has almost a thriller plot, with the film hinging on Gladstone’s missing sister. It would be unfair to Tromblay to say she offers local flavour to push along generic storytelling, but we can watch it and still feel the pull of genre at work as readily as the force of the environment upon the characters. 

      In this sense, War Pony can seem a purer film than Fancy Dance, one that has plenty going on that can make following it intricate, but without events quite pile-driving themselves into a powerful narrative. It is more that the messiness of the lives the film shows demands storytelling that captures the chaos. When for example one of the film’s leading characters’ father dies, what matters is less the killing and who is responsible and what will be done about it; more that the young boy, Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder) is now orphaned. He will try and live with an older woman nearby but she isn’t so keen to have him around since she sells drugs and the 12-year-old Matho has been dealing too. When he almost gets caught selling stuff at school it puts her livelihood at risk and she wants him to leave. Instead of a complicated drugs bust at her home, the film focuses on the vacuum that is the boy’s life — one filled by a gang of friends who will only get Matho into more trouble. 

     Matho’s story is paralleled by Bill's (Jojo Bapteise Whiting). Bill is 23 and sees he needs to get his shit together. He has two kids with two women, and one of these is in jail and looking for bail money. Bill reckons he can raise it by raising puppies he will then sell on, but his best chance of making a few dollars is when he picks up a man on the side of the road whose truck has blown a tyre. Here is a white man not short of cash and Bill is quick to insist on 80 dollars to get the man, Tim, back to his house, and then negotiates another 300 to swap the tyre, and also take a girl Tim has in the truck back to her home somewhere on the reservation. Tim also looks like he can give Bill a job, partly working in Tim’s turkey factory; partly chauffeuring around Tim’s various flings. Later in the film, Tim’s wife confronts Bill over the latter, saying that she has seen Tim’s messages, knows Bill’s implicated, and says technically he could end up in jail for sex trafficking. In another film, this would be a central plot point, but little is made of it without the scene looking like it needn’t be there. Whether it is Matho’s father’s death, Matho’s drug dealing at school or Bill potentially getting done for aiding and abetting Tim’s whoring ways, these are all plot points that dissolve rather than harden. It might be why Robert Daniels reckons it is “…a movie that solely prizes trauma. At this point, it's become a cudgel to accuse a film of being a shallow endeavor because it litigates the stories of a people through its possible horrific reality. Some lives are inherently disturbing.” But Daniels also reckons there is a problem with the film’s “…inability to convey an existence outside of unwed mothers, apathetic parents, and brutal socioeconomic disparity [and] that leaves one wanting.” (RogerEbert.Com)

       Yet there is in Daniels’ comment about trauma over drama one that is worth exploring — in most films, the traumatic serves the dramatic rather than the other way round. Think of many a biopic that turns childhood trauma into a person’s popular success, including I Walk the Line, What’s Love Got to Do With It and Sweet Dreams: the films use trauma but they aren’t stuck in it. The point is that out of adverse circumstances, greatness came. They are variations of the phrase that you can take the person out of the street but you can’t take the street out of the person: that the trauma will still play out later in the film, later in their lives. But it won’t be where the film resides: trauma must give way to drama. 

    In War Pony it doesn’t, and why we see the film as not so much plotless as full of potential plots that aren’t activated. The reason for this may be that plots are usually fictional creations and what the film is interested in, because the characters are, is schemes. Schemes are plots that often never come to fruition but the point of drama is often to show a particular scheme that does and gets turned into plot. Sidney Lumet films as varied as Dog Day Afternoon and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead offer schemes cooked up into plots and producing the messiest of dishes as a bank robbery and a heist go wrong respectively. The perpetrators aren’t career criminals; they are desperate incompetents, but Lumet turns their respective schemes into plots as the screws on each of the film’s leading character’s tighten. They are great examples of turning the former into the latter, just as there are many more examples of films whose characters are too professionally focused to offer schemes. They instead have a plan. The plan may go wrong as it often does in even the most brilliantly organised heists: like in The Red Circle or Heat. But the purpose rests on the generic coding of criminality all the better so that the filmmakers can show brilliant men doing their work well, even if a character flaw, a vengeful protagonist, a no less brilliant cop or a bit of misfortune, scuppers them. The best-laid plans of mice and men do indeed go awry, but they are well laid nevertheless.

         Often a scheme that turns into a plot suggests the worst of plans and tells us about the characters’ desperation rather than allowing for the plot’s successful execution. If Lumet, in both Dog Day Afternoon and The Devil Knows You’re Dead, wants to use the scheme to reveal clammy need, he nevertheless still follows through on the plot, while in War Pony directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough don’t, with the closest to one that follows through probably Bill and the dog. This is nothing if not a scheme, as Bill hopes without much likelihood of it coming off to breed puppies that he will sell. Nothing materially comes of this but what does is a minor catastrophe. Bill is at Tim’s place working as a host during a Halloween party and he has taken along to the house his two kids he can’t find a babysitter for and the pup who will look after them as they wait in the car while Bill is at work. Tim breeds turkeys and has a rafter of them beside the house. When one of the kids gets out of the car to pee, the dog escapes too and kills some of the turkeys. Tim kills the dog: this is the end of Bill’s breeding adventures and a curtailing of Tim’s. But there is no doubt Tim will be back making money soon again enough from the turkey factory and Bill will move onto a further scheme. Yet if the moment feels tragic, as the film plays this up in the sound design, it rests on the relative development of a story that has been brought to a halt. We know Bill’s scheme is now over, even if it has covered two acts of the film. 

Does the film generally fail to follow through on the stories it instigates out of integrity or ineptitude, out of a desire to be faithful to the community it brings to the screen or an inability to bring to completion plot elements it introduces? Wes Greene reckons “War Pony possesses a gritty essence, but for however uncompromising its glimpse into Bill and Matho’s stagnantly bleak existences may be, the film also feels generic in execution…., instead they’re almost stubbornly focused on capturing an unflinchingly unvarnished view of day-to-day life on society’s fringes.” (Slant) There seems to be a contradiction in Greene’s claim: that the film covers the reservation realistically and yet is a generic work. Keough reckoned: “We weren’t making it for the world. The world happened to respond to it. We weren’t going, ‘How do we explain this moment to the Western world?”’ (Slant)

     How do we negotiate the contradictions in Greene’s remarks and the potential naivety in Keough’s? It isn’t just that War Pony premiered at Cannes and received distribution — these wanglings will be part of any film that is distributed by even so independent a company as Momentum. Many a documentary will also be similarly distributed. It is more that War Pony is a fiction film and by definition indicates it wants to tell a story. How it tells it helps explain Greene’s apparent contradictions and Keough’s ingenuousness. The film is far less generic than Winter’s Bone and Fancy Dance, with the latter films relying on a hook that pulls the story along and leads to a categorical denouement. In Winter’s Bone, the plot concerns central character Ree whose father appears to have jumped bail and if he isn’t found they will take the house. She lives in the Ozark with her mentally ill mum and her siblings whom she looks after. She needs to find her father to keep the house and this becomes the film’s focus as it turns into a thriller. In Fancy Dance, a teenage girl’s mum goes missing and her aunt is determined to find out what happened to her. The film is less focused than Winter’s Bone but in both instances, the film’s endings rest on finding a body. In different ways they play up the importance of locale: in Winter’s Bone much is made of location. “Why is the country so big if you’re not going to show other parts of it? What a waste of civilisation!’ The idea of depicting this side of America didn’t make the film an attractive economic prospect.” Granek said. ‘It was unappealing to any financing entity, even those open to socially relevant material. It’s risky to show poor Americans. People see it as a downer. But I really wanted to make a tightly wound piece of storytelling that also happened to explode the myth of American affluence. (Time Out) Fancy Dance’s director Erica Tremblay reckoned, “…as a person who grew up in northeastern Oklahoma and southwest Missouri in my community, these characters are people that I know and they’re people that I recognize. I had a white dad, and I had grown up in the fear of what that means in terms of at any time could my sister and I be removed from my mother and be removed from our community. I wanted to explore those things in the film.” (FFT) Granek may have been an outsider respecting the community and Tremblay an insider determined to explore hers, but both do so with the locale as a backdrop — as we have noted, generic thriller filmmaking is also important. 

Granek and Tremblay’s films see the community finally as secondary while story pulls the viewer along; Gemmell and Keough instead focus on the characters who are too messed up for a plot to develop around them. Unlike Ree in Winter’s Bone, the two leading characters drift from situation to situation, yet we can imagine a story where Matho searches out Bill and relies on this figure ten years older to help him take out his father’s killers. Then we would have a plot instead of a series of schemes. Matho instead however takes over his father’s drug-dealing and gets thrown out of the house by a person who may otherwise have looked after him were he not both selling the same merchandise and doing so in a school environment, one that would bring even more risk to her already very risky ventures. His actions don’t lead to progress but to a regress, to finding himself with nowhere to live. 

     The question then becomes whether this is a sign of the film’s success or its failure. Should a film tell a story well or depict its milieu convincingly? But if to reflect that world it makes more sense to show lassitude and failure over effort and possible success, then this is what a film must do. One can admire Granik for telling a story against an Ozark backdrop, but maybe the admiration rests on a thriller with a locational twist over a locational specificity given a narrative thrust. Granik may have said “I’d interviewed an actress who you might call an It Girl, and the ambivalence on her part was so tense it was intimidating. We were doing a low-budget film on location in the Ozarks; you can’t go there with even an ounce of ambivalence.” (Time Out) Yet that Granik was considering an It girl indicates the purpose of the film; that it wanted a strong, attractive central character who could carry the story. In contrast, in War Pony, Whiting seems to possess a charisma much more located in place than Jennifer Lawrence’s in Winter’s Bone. Both performances have consistently been described as cool, charismatic and charming, while War Pony’s most commonly used still is of Baptiste, topless, holding one of his kids in an image that isn’t too far removed from an Athena poster. Nevertheless, Whiting’s appeal seems quite different from Lawrence’s, who’d signed up with a talent agency long before getting the role in Granik’s film. She might not have been an It girl, but Lawrence was a star in the making. Whatever career awaits Whiting, he clearly comes from the community the film depicts, while Lawrence may have been brought up in a state (Kentucky) next door to Missouri, but this needed to give her no more than a patina of authenticity — as if the film wasn’t ethnographically single-minded enough for this to represent a compromise. It was instead a canny choice. 

        Winter’s Bone would be in Andre Bazin’s terms an amalgamated movie, one that combines professional competence (evident not just in Lawrence’s role but also in an important supporting one played by John Hawkes) with non-professional authenticity. Bazin reckoned that in Italian neo-realism we began to see an amalgam, where “…news items in the press naturally made a point of letting us know that [the film] Sciusca [Shoeshine] was filled with genuine street urchins, that Rossellini shot crowds at random at the scene of the action, that the heroine of the first story of Paisa was an illiterate girl discovered on the dockside.” Rossellini combined this with professional casting, with Anna Magnani, in Rome Open City, but she was close enough to the world in which she was deposited. However. Bazin also saw that casting amateurs in a film could “…carry the seeds of its own destruction…indispensable as are the factors of inexperience and naivety, obviously they cannot survive repetition.” (What is Cinema?, Vol II) Whiting may or may not survive thespian recurrence; Lawrence like most professional actors was expected to survive repetition within difference — the general point and purpose of a professional actor. 

        The contrast to the professional actor is usually not the amateur but the subject — someone in a documentary whose life is explored without any fictional accompaniment, even if on occasion the subject might be asked to repeat a gesture for a second or third take. Their purpose is to be themselves and for a long time would be expected to remain so, but in more recent decades playing oneself hasn’t been for documented veracity but for an initial stab at becoming famous. Numerous shows like Big Brother and Love Island aren’t supposed to tell us very much about a person’s life (often the show extricates them from it by putting them in a compound or at a luxury retreat); it is more inclined to register the scale of their ambition. They become media celebrities, advertising products, models, whatever they can do to stay in the limelight without a specific talent for being there. It is Christopher Lasch’s culture of narcissism meeting Andy Warhol’s idea of everybody in the future having fifteen minutes of fame. As Lasch says, “the proliferation of visual and auditory images in a ‘society of the Spectacle’…encouraged a similar kind of preoccupation with the self. People responded to others as if their actions were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present, in varying degrees, in everyone….” (The Culture of Narcissism)  The idea is that the person tries to sustain that moment for a lot longer than a quarter of an hour and some, like the Kardashians, become huge stars competing with the most famous of Hollywood icons. When Kim Kardashian wore a $4.8m Marilyn Monroe dress at a Met Gala, people may have been horrified at the risk to the dress but no less so that a reality star believed she could see herself somehow as the equal of one of Hollywood’s most iconic of actresses. Defending herself, Kardashian “undertook an extreme weight-loss regime to try and squeeze into the dress, which involved a vegetable-centric diet, lots of time on the treadmill and wearing a sauna suit twice a day.” Kardashian reckoned, “it was such a challenge…It was like a role, I was determined to fit it.’” (Guardian) This we should remember isn’t someone trying to play Monroe in a fictional account of her life, it is no more, and no less, than a reality star determined to fit into an item of clothing. Yet Kardashian presents it as worthy of an Oscar. 

       The subject versus the actor might have started off as an attempt to portray people within the context of their own life, while the actor’s purpose is to play of course other characters, but it is now frequently a version of Lasch’s narcissism over a portrayal of a person within their own environs. The films discussed have to varying degrees at least attempted to recapture an aspect of this credibility. The image of Whiting might have become vital to the film’s publicity campaign but that doesn’t mean it isn’t rooted in situation and character within the film, and the character played by Whiting is in turnrooted in the community. The irony is that with ‘reality’ so debased on screen through reality TV shows, ethnographic fictions with Whiting and Ladainian Crazy Thunder, playing fictional versions of themselves, might be the best way of capturing authenticity on screen. Offering them as subjects to the camera in documentative form would have been of value when documentary was itself consistently deemed credible as a way of exploring truth, but perhaps not at the moment when Love Island can pass itself off as fact when it seems to show chiefly the deracinated seeking fame and fortune. What War Pony does is show the difficulties of its characters' lives through the difficulty of forming a coherent narrative around them. This might appear condescending as Greene believes, or it might be statistically the most accurate way of depicting a given community. The point of most narratives is to focus on the exceptional and, while this has its place, it also potentially displaces characters into a narrative version of the extirpating, as we find when people are removed from their milieu and planted in a compound or on an island. 

      In other words, while it is great for storytelling to offer the exceptional circumstance; it isn’t the best way to capture the general life of a given locale. If “it is important to understand the socio-economic status of Native Americans and how this compares to other populations such as African Americans, Hispanics and Whites...in too many measures, Native Americans have the lowest socio-economic indicators,” then exceptional stories may not be useful in reflecting this." As  Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Kathy Ramirez continue to note, “the 2018 Bureau of Labor Statistics data reported that the unemployment rate among Native Americans was 6.6%, aligning closely to the percentage of African Americans at 6.5%, but lagging far behind Hispanics at 4.7%, and Whites at 3.5%.” (NCRC) They also observe that “Native Americans have a poverty rate of 25%, over 3 times the poverty rate of White Americans.” (NCRC) To tell a Native American story of achievement and prosperity is no bad thing, but it wouldn’t be very statistically accurate. While some may find focusing on people's misfortunes less useful than telling stories of hope and prosperity, the latter can seem a lot less ‘honest’. “While Native Americans account for only a small part of the U.S. population, these people experience much higher rates of substance abuse compared to other racial and ethnic groups.” (American Addiction Centers)  

       It could be argued that the statistical is contrary to the narrational — cold figures versus warm storytelling. However, the purpose behind a bleak story needn’t be to patronise or belittle the people under scrutiny, but to give an account that contains the statistical truth of an environment without relying on the coldness of facts to explore it. During especially the 60s and 70s, and into the 80,s there were various ethnographic departments at Harvard, in  MIT, UCLA and other places doing research that was film-based rather than article-focused, producing works as varied as Titicut Follies, Rivers of Sand, Forest of Bliss. More recently there have also been sensory ethnographic works including Leviathan And Manakamana. None of the films are narratively oriented, but they are explorations of communities and situations — from fishermen and their catch in Leviathan, to those using a cable car in Manakamana. Leviathan might invoke Moby Dick (it is set in the same seas off New Bedford, where Ahab searched for the great whale) but imagine a film that instead of focusing on Ahab and the enormous mammal, concentrates far more on the small fish to be found in the ocean. Moby Dick offers the exception; Leviathan the statistically mundane.  It wouldn’t be quite fair to say this happens to be so with War Pony; nevertheless, the film understands the tension between conveying a sense of community and delineating a story, and finds a position closer to the ethnographic than Fancy Dance or Winter’s Bone partly because it depicts the lives so messily that we are pulled into the characters’ chaos rather than thrown into the diegesis. The story isn’t quite the thing. 

      Yet perhaps in seeing the work as fictional, the directors also felt the need to draw on the symbolic, with Keough saying “the animal symbolism came about organically through asking their young Lakota actors to connect their characters’ emotions with the animals that represent them. The way we chose the specific moments for the animals was by asking the boys… what would represent this in this moment for you?”  Keough adds, she would ask them: “if you were doing something that maybe you didn’t feel like was the right thing to do, and then something happened to sort of change your path or change your mind, what would represent that? I think the Buffalo was one of those, and then also Iktómi, the spider” (Iktómi is the Lakota word for spider).” (Moviemaker) Documentary may invoke the symbolic but fiction would be much more inclined to do so. By making a film about a people that is ethnographic in its enquiry, its symbolism can give it an added patina of the fictional. Yet this symbolism would be intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic: images that conjure up a specific culture rather than general symbols that films often use to transcend cultural specificity: birds symbolising freedom, water, baptism, red, danger; green envy and so on. 

A film might not even deliberately put them in there to signify symbolism, yet so often are they read culturally as symbolic, this will be how a viewer may interpret them, even if the images are practically present and needn’t be read connotatively. In Moonlight, the central character learns how to swim and does so, unsurprisingly, in water. But that won’t stop critics seeing in it symbolism, and they may be right to do so, but so general a symbol is water, and so integrated into the pragmatics of the plot happens to be the scene, that there is no need to read anything more into it than what is there. 

   With the buffalo in War Pony this isn’t the case. Billy sees it early on and Matho much later, but what both see is a figment of their imagination and so we are inclined to read into it meaning based on the absence of its pragmatic function.The puppy needn’t serve the same role because it is integrated into the plot — we may view it symbolically if we like, but its plot purpose needn’t insist we do so. Whether the use of the buffalo makes the film heavy-handed or not is up to the individual viewer to decide, but it isn’t literal - and it is culturally specific. It asks to be read and can best be understood through the boys’ comprehension of its symbolic purpose in their environment. While a more plot-driven film might conclude with a death that tells them that they are in danger, the directors propose that they should listen to a sign that isn’t a practical outcome of the story, but an aspect of ancient wisdom that they ought not so much to learn but re-learn. They need to understand that the material world where they busy themselves with schemes that go wrong ought to be secondary to a sagacity that links them to their milieu.

       Some might insist this is all very well coming from Gemmell and Keough, the latter the granddaughter of none other than Elvis Presley, perhaps the most famous and successful American singer of the 20th century.  (No matter if Presley was said to have Cherokee blood.)  But as Keough said, “there was a moment when we thought, ‘This is a little bit scary, and maybe we shouldn’t do it. And so we kind of pumped the brakes on it. But ultimately, we’d put in so much work and our writers had put in so much work, and they’re indigenous and this is about their lives.” (The Wrap) Better perhaps than insisting on cultural appropriation, to see War Pony as an attempt to broaden still further the legitimate presence of Native American culture on screen. In an important essay written in 1973, John A Price looked at the history of the Native American in film and noted that steadily the presentations had improved. "While in a film serial from the 1930s the Indians were given a language by running their normal English dialogue backwards”  (‘The Stereotyping of North American Indians in Motion Pictures’), John Ford westerns of the late forties and fifties offered some nuance and specificity. While for years whites were frequently cast in Native American Indian parts, in 1966 An Indian Actors Guild was formed in Los Angeles “to promote the use of Native people in Native roles, to promote the training of Indians in trick riding and other horseman skills, and to promote the teaching of dramatic skills to Indian” (‘The Stereotyping of North American Indians in Motion Pictures’) Price could see that by the early 1970s, films including Hombre, Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here, A Man Called Horse and Little Big Man were portraying the American Indian with far more fidelity and respect than hitherto, and that would continue with later films like Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals and Killers of the Flower Moon. Yet War Pony more than most has put Indigenous Americans at the centre of the story and has even been willing to forgo much of what passes for narrative in concentrating on the specifics of the characters' lives.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

War Pony

Schemes, Plots and the Statistically Likely

What is cinema ethno-fiction? Some would see it chiefly in documentary, in works by anyone from Robert Flaherty to Jean Rouch — from the staged and planned documentaries that give the impression of fact offered by the former,or the more self-conscious even self-reflexive work by the latter. While Flaherty would stage the walrus hunt in Nanook of the North, Rouch makes us aware of the process by having those in Chronicle of a Summer commenting on the made film at the end of its screening — which itself becomes part of the film. 

Yet what interests us here is contemporary fiction films made with an ethnographic base, where the narrative comes fictionally out of a given community: Atanarjuat: The Distance Runner, Winter’s Bone, A Ciambra, Fancy Dance, War Pony and others. To varying degrees the films rely on the active engagement of the community it focuses upon; sometimes behind the camera; sometimes in front of it. 90 per cent of the crew behind Atanarjuat were Inuit, while in A Ciambra, the director spent six years visiting a Romani community as he was determined to offer ethnographic accuracy. “Every time [director Jonas] Carpignano would meet with the Amatos, he took detailed notes of their interactions and stories, naturally told in gregarious fashion, ultimately channelling them into a narrative around one of the youngest members of the family.” (The Moveable Feast) The cast were nonprofessionals from the community playing versions of themselves. Speaking of Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik said, “we knew it had to be there, it had to have local people populating the film visually. There is no chance that this film would come to life in any way that would be close to the book—or close to any anthropological sense of precision—unless we did it there.’ (NPR)

       Sometimes the films will have the community as a backdrop but will be cast professionally. Winter Bone has John Hawke in a key supporting role and its lead, Jennifer Lawrence, has become a major Hollywood star. In Fancy Dance, Lily Gladstone is very much playing a character that wouldn’t be alien to her: a woman living on an Indian reservation looking out for her niece. Gladstone was brought up on Blackfleet in Montana, though the film is set on the Seneca Cayuga reservation in Missouri, where the director Erica Tromblay was brought up. But Gladstone is also now a star, appearing in Certain Women and Killer of the Flower Moons. Fancy Dance also has almost a thriller plot, with the film hinging on Gladstone’s missing sister. It would be unfair to Tromblay to say she offers local flavour to push along generic storytelling, but we can watch it and still feel the pull of genre at work as readily as the force of the environment upon the characters. 

      In this sense, War Pony can seem a purer film than Fancy Dance, one that has plenty going on that can make following it intricate, but without events quite pile-driving themselves into a powerful narrative. It is more that the messiness of the lives the film shows demands storytelling that captures the chaos. When for example one of the film’s leading characters’ father dies, what matters is less the killing and who is responsible and what will be done about it; more that the young boy, Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder) is now orphaned. He will try and live with an older woman nearby but she isn’t so keen to have him around since she sells drugs and the 12-year-old Matho has been dealing too. When he almost gets caught selling stuff at school it puts her livelihood at risk and she wants him to leave. Instead of a complicated drugs bust at her home, the film focuses on the vacuum that is the boy’s life — one filled by a gang of friends who will only get Matho into more trouble. 

     Matho’s story is paralleled by Bill's (Jojo Bapteise Whiting). Bill is 23 and sees he needs to get his shit together. He has two kids with two women, and one of these is in jail and looking for bail money. Bill reckons he can raise it by raising puppies he will then sell on, but his best chance of making a few dollars is when he picks up a man on the side of the road whose truck has blown a tyre. Here is a white man not short of cash and Bill is quick to insist on 80 dollars to get the man, Tim, back to his house, and then negotiates another 300 to swap the tyre, and also take a girl Tim has in the truck back to her home somewhere on the reservation. Tim also looks like he can give Bill a job, partly working in Tim’s turkey factory; partly chauffeuring around Tim’s various flings. Later in the film, Tim’s wife confronts Bill over the latter, saying that she has seen Tim’s messages, knows Bill’s implicated, and says technically he could end up in jail for sex trafficking. In another film, this would be a central plot point, but little is made of it without the scene looking like it needn’t be there. Whether it is Matho’s father’s death, Matho’s drug dealing at school or Bill potentially getting done for aiding and abetting Tim’s whoring ways, these are all plot points that dissolve rather than harden. It might be why Robert Daniels reckons it is “…a movie that solely prizes trauma. At this point, it's become a cudgel to accuse a film of being a shallow endeavor because it litigates the stories of a people through its possible horrific reality. Some lives are inherently disturbing.” But Daniels also reckons there is a problem with the film’s “…inability to convey an existence outside of unwed mothers, apathetic parents, and brutal socioeconomic disparity [and] that leaves one wanting.” (RogerEbert.Com)

       Yet there is in Daniels’ comment about trauma over drama one that is worth exploring — in most films, the traumatic serves the dramatic rather than the other way round. Think of many a biopic that turns childhood trauma into a person’s popular success, including I Walk the Line, What’s Love Got to Do With It and Sweet Dreams: the films use trauma but they aren’t stuck in it. The point is that out of adverse circumstances, greatness came. They are variations of the phrase that you can take the person out of the street but you can’t take the street out of the person: that the trauma will still play out later in the film, later in their lives. But it won’t be where the film resides: trauma must give way to drama. 

    In War Pony it doesn’t, and why we see the film as not so much plotless as full of potential plots that aren’t activated. The reason for this may be that plots are usually fictional creations and what the film is interested in, because the characters are, is schemes. Schemes are plots that often never come to fruition but the point of drama is often to show a particular scheme that does and gets turned into plot. Sidney Lumet films as varied as Dog Day Afternoon and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead offer schemes cooked up into plots and producing the messiest of dishes as a bank robbery and a heist go wrong respectively. The perpetrators aren’t career criminals; they are desperate incompetents, but Lumet turns their respective schemes into plots as the screws on each of the film’s leading character’s tighten. They are great examples of turning the former into the latter, just as there are many more examples of films whose characters are too professionally focused to offer schemes. They instead have a plan. The plan may go wrong as it often does in even the most brilliantly organised heists: like in The Red Circle or Heat. But the purpose rests on the generic coding of criminality all the better so that the filmmakers can show brilliant men doing their work well, even if a character flaw, a vengeful protagonist, a no less brilliant cop or a bit of misfortune, scuppers them. The best-laid plans of mice and men do indeed go awry, but they are well laid nevertheless.

         Often a scheme that turns into a plot suggests the worst of plans and tells us about the characters’ desperation rather than allowing for the plot’s successful execution. If Lumet, in both Dog Day Afternoon and The Devil Knows You’re Dead, wants to use the scheme to reveal clammy need, he nevertheless still follows through on the plot, while in War Pony directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough don’t, with the closest to one that follows through probably Bill and the dog. This is nothing if not a scheme, as Bill hopes without much likelihood of it coming off to breed puppies that he will sell. Nothing materially comes of this but what does is a minor catastrophe. Bill is at Tim’s place working as a host during a Halloween party and he has taken along to the house his two kids he can’t find a babysitter for and the pup who will look after them as they wait in the car while Bill is at work. Tim breeds turkeys and has a rafter of them beside the house. When one of the kids gets out of the car to pee, the dog escapes too and kills some of the turkeys. Tim kills the dog: this is the end of Bill’s breeding adventures and a curtailing of Tim’s. But there is no doubt Tim will be back making money soon again enough from the turkey factory and Bill will move onto a further scheme. Yet if the moment feels tragic, as the film plays this up in the sound design, it rests on the relative development of a story that has been brought to a halt. We know Bill’s scheme is now over, even if it has covered two acts of the film. 

Does the film generally fail to follow through on the stories it instigates out of integrity or ineptitude, out of a desire to be faithful to the community it brings to the screen or an inability to bring to completion plot elements it introduces? Wes Greene reckons “War Pony possesses a gritty essence, but for however uncompromising its glimpse into Bill and Matho’s stagnantly bleak existences may be, the film also feels generic in execution…., instead they’re almost stubbornly focused on capturing an unflinchingly unvarnished view of day-to-day life on society’s fringes.” (Slant) There seems to be a contradiction in Greene’s claim: that the film covers the reservation realistically and yet is a generic work. Keough reckoned: “We weren’t making it for the world. The world happened to respond to it. We weren’t going, ‘How do we explain this moment to the Western world?”’ (Slant)

     How do we negotiate the contradictions in Greene’s remarks and the potential naivety in Keough’s? It isn’t just that War Pony premiered at Cannes and received distribution — these wanglings will be part of any film that is distributed by even so independent a company as Momentum. Many a documentary will also be similarly distributed. It is more that War Pony is a fiction film and by definition indicates it wants to tell a story. How it tells it helps explain Greene’s apparent contradictions and Keough’s ingenuousness. The film is far less generic than Winter’s Bone and Fancy Dance, with the latter films relying on a hook that pulls the story along and leads to a categorical denouement. In Winter’s Bone, the plot concerns central character Ree whose father appears to have jumped bail and if he isn’t found they will take the house. She lives in the Ozark with her mentally ill mum and her siblings whom she looks after. She needs to find her father to keep the house and this becomes the film’s focus as it turns into a thriller. In Fancy Dance, a teenage girl’s mum goes missing and her aunt is determined to find out what happened to her. The film is less focused than Winter’s Bone but in both instances, the film’s endings rest on finding a body. In different ways they play up the importance of locale: in Winter’s Bone much is made of location. “Why is the country so big if you’re not going to show other parts of it? What a waste of civilisation!’ The idea of depicting this side of America didn’t make the film an attractive economic prospect.” Granek said. ‘It was unappealing to any financing entity, even those open to socially relevant material. It’s risky to show poor Americans. People see it as a downer. But I really wanted to make a tightly wound piece of storytelling that also happened to explode the myth of American affluence. (Time Out) Fancy Dance’s director Erica Tremblay reckoned, “…as a person who grew up in northeastern Oklahoma and southwest Missouri in my community, these characters are people that I know and they’re people that I recognize. I had a white dad, and I had grown up in the fear of what that means in terms of at any time could my sister and I be removed from my mother and be removed from our community. I wanted to explore those things in the film.” (FFT) Granek may have been an outsider respecting the community and Tremblay an insider determined to explore hers, but both do so with the locale as a backdrop — as we have noted, generic thriller filmmaking is also important. 

Granek and Tremblay’s films see the community finally as secondary while story pulls the viewer along; Gemmell and Keough instead focus on the characters who are too messed up for a plot to develop around them. Unlike Ree in Winter’s Bone, the two leading characters drift from situation to situation, yet we can imagine a story where Matho searches out Bill and relies on this figure ten years older to help him take out his father’s killers. Then we would have a plot instead of a series of schemes. Matho instead however takes over his father’s drug-dealing and gets thrown out of the house by a person who may otherwise have looked after him were he not both selling the same merchandise and doing so in a school environment, one that would bring even more risk to her already very risky ventures. His actions don’t lead to progress but to a regress, to finding himself with nowhere to live. 

     The question then becomes whether this is a sign of the film’s success or its failure. Should a film tell a story well or depict its milieu convincingly? But if to reflect that world it makes more sense to show lassitude and failure over effort and possible success, then this is what a film must do. One can admire Granik for telling a story against an Ozark backdrop, but maybe the admiration rests on a thriller with a locational twist over a locational specificity given a narrative thrust. Granik may have said “I’d interviewed an actress who you might call an It Girl, and the ambivalence on her part was so tense it was intimidating. We were doing a low-budget film on location in the Ozarks; you can’t go there with even an ounce of ambivalence.” (Time Out) Yet that Granik was considering an It girl indicates the purpose of the film; that it wanted a strong, attractive central character who could carry the story. In contrast, in War Pony, Whiting seems to possess a charisma much more located in place than Jennifer Lawrence’s in Winter’s Bone. Both performances have consistently been described as cool, charismatic and charming, while War Pony’s most commonly used still is of Baptiste, topless, holding one of his kids in an image that isn’t too far removed from an Athena poster. Nevertheless, Whiting’s appeal seems quite different from Lawrence’s, who’d signed up with a talent agency long before getting the role in Granik’s film. She might not have been an It girl, but Lawrence was a star in the making. Whatever career awaits Whiting, he clearly comes from the community the film depicts, while Lawrence may have been brought up in a state (Kentucky) next door to Missouri, but this needed to give her no more than a patina of authenticity — as if the film wasn’t ethnographically single-minded enough for this to represent a compromise. It was instead a canny choice. 

        Winter’s Bone would be in Andre Bazin’s terms an amalgamated movie, one that combines professional competence (evident not just in Lawrence’s role but also in an important supporting one played by John Hawkes) with non-professional authenticity. Bazin reckoned that in Italian neo-realism we began to see an amalgam, where “…news items in the press naturally made a point of letting us know that [the film] Sciusca [Shoeshine] was filled with genuine street urchins, that Rossellini shot crowds at random at the scene of the action, that the heroine of the first story of Paisa was an illiterate girl discovered on the dockside.” Rossellini combined this with professional casting, with Anna Magnani, in Rome Open City, but she was close enough to the world in which she was deposited. However. Bazin also saw that casting amateurs in a film could “…carry the seeds of its own destruction…indispensable as are the factors of inexperience and naivety, obviously they cannot survive repetition.” (What is Cinema?, Vol II) Whiting may or may not survive thespian recurrence; Lawrence like most professional actors was expected to survive repetition within difference — the general point and purpose of a professional actor. 

        The contrast to the professional actor is usually not the amateur but the subject — someone in a documentary whose life is explored without any fictional accompaniment, even if on occasion the subject might be asked to repeat a gesture for a second or third take. Their purpose is to be themselves and for a long time would be expected to remain so, but in more recent decades playing oneself hasn’t been for documented veracity but for an initial stab at becoming famous. Numerous shows like Big Brother and Love Island aren’t supposed to tell us very much about a person’s life (often the show extricates them from it by putting them in a compound or at a luxury retreat); it is more inclined to register the scale of their ambition. They become media celebrities, advertising products, models, whatever they can do to stay in the limelight without a specific talent for being there. It is Christopher Lasch’s culture of narcissism meeting Andy Warhol’s idea of everybody in the future having fifteen minutes of fame. As Lasch says, “the proliferation of visual and auditory images in a ‘society of the Spectacle’…encouraged a similar kind of preoccupation with the self. People responded to others as if their actions were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present, in varying degrees, in everyone….” (The Culture of Narcissism)  The idea is that the person tries to sustain that moment for a lot longer than a quarter of an hour and some, like the Kardashians, become huge stars competing with the most famous of Hollywood icons. When Kim Kardashian wore a $4.8m Marilyn Monroe dress at a Met Gala, people may have been horrified at the risk to the dress but no less so that a reality star believed she could see herself somehow as the equal of one of Hollywood’s most iconic of actresses. Defending herself, Kardashian “undertook an extreme weight-loss regime to try and squeeze into the dress, which involved a vegetable-centric diet, lots of time on the treadmill and wearing a sauna suit twice a day.” Kardashian reckoned, “it was such a challenge…It was like a role, I was determined to fit it.’” (Guardian) This we should remember isn’t someone trying to play Monroe in a fictional account of her life, it is no more, and no less, than a reality star determined to fit into an item of clothing. Yet Kardashian presents it as worthy of an Oscar. 

       The subject versus the actor might have started off as an attempt to portray people within the context of their own life, while the actor’s purpose is to play of course other characters, but it is now frequently a version of Lasch’s narcissism over a portrayal of a person within their own environs. The films discussed have to varying degrees at least attempted to recapture an aspect of this credibility. The image of Whiting might have become vital to the film’s publicity campaign but that doesn’t mean it isn’t rooted in situation and character within the film, and the character played by Whiting is in turnrooted in the community. The irony is that with ‘reality’ so debased on screen through reality TV shows, ethnographic fictions with Whiting and Ladainian Crazy Thunder, playing fictional versions of themselves, might be the best way of capturing authenticity on screen. Offering them as subjects to the camera in documentative form would have been of value when documentary was itself consistently deemed credible as a way of exploring truth, but perhaps not at the moment when Love Island can pass itself off as fact when it seems to show chiefly the deracinated seeking fame and fortune. What War Pony does is show the difficulties of its characters' lives through the difficulty of forming a coherent narrative around them. This might appear condescending as Greene believes, or it might be statistically the most accurate way of depicting a given community. The point of most narratives is to focus on the exceptional and, while this has its place, it also potentially displaces characters into a narrative version of the extirpating, as we find when people are removed from their milieu and planted in a compound or on an island. 

      In other words, while it is great for storytelling to offer the exceptional circumstance; it isn’t the best way to capture the general life of a given locale. If “it is important to understand the socio-economic status of Native Americans and how this compares to other populations such as African Americans, Hispanics and Whites...in too many measures, Native Americans have the lowest socio-economic indicators,” then exceptional stories may not be useful in reflecting this." As  Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Kathy Ramirez continue to note, “the 2018 Bureau of Labor Statistics data reported that the unemployment rate among Native Americans was 6.6%, aligning closely to the percentage of African Americans at 6.5%, but lagging far behind Hispanics at 4.7%, and Whites at 3.5%.” (NCRC) They also observe that “Native Americans have a poverty rate of 25%, over 3 times the poverty rate of White Americans.” (NCRC) To tell a Native American story of achievement and prosperity is no bad thing, but it wouldn’t be very statistically accurate. While some may find focusing on people's misfortunes less useful than telling stories of hope and prosperity, the latter can seem a lot less ‘honest’. “While Native Americans account for only a small part of the U.S. population, these people experience much higher rates of substance abuse compared to other racial and ethnic groups.” (American Addiction Centers)  

       It could be argued that the statistical is contrary to the narrational — cold figures versus warm storytelling. However, the purpose behind a bleak story needn’t be to patronise or belittle the people under scrutiny, but to give an account that contains the statistical truth of an environment without relying on the coldness of facts to explore it. During especially the 60s and 70s, and into the 80,s there were various ethnographic departments at Harvard, in  MIT, UCLA and other places doing research that was film-based rather than article-focused, producing works as varied as Titicut Follies, Rivers of Sand, Forest of Bliss. More recently there have also been sensory ethnographic works including Leviathan And Manakamana. None of the films are narratively oriented, but they are explorations of communities and situations — from fishermen and their catch in Leviathan, to those using a cable car in Manakamana. Leviathan might invoke Moby Dick (it is set in the same seas off New Bedford, where Ahab searched for the great whale) but imagine a film that instead of focusing on Ahab and the enormous mammal, concentrates far more on the small fish to be found in the ocean. Moby Dick offers the exception; Leviathan the statistically mundane.  It wouldn’t be quite fair to say this happens to be so with War Pony; nevertheless, the film understands the tension between conveying a sense of community and delineating a story, and finds a position closer to the ethnographic than Fancy Dance or Winter’s Bone partly because it depicts the lives so messily that we are pulled into the characters’ chaos rather than thrown into the diegesis. The story isn’t quite the thing. 

      Yet perhaps in seeing the work as fictional, the directors also felt the need to draw on the symbolic, with Keough saying “the animal symbolism came about organically through asking their young Lakota actors to connect their characters’ emotions with the animals that represent them. The way we chose the specific moments for the animals was by asking the boys… what would represent this in this moment for you?”  Keough adds, she would ask them: “if you were doing something that maybe you didn’t feel like was the right thing to do, and then something happened to sort of change your path or change your mind, what would represent that? I think the Buffalo was one of those, and then also Iktómi, the spider” (Iktómi is the Lakota word for spider).” (Moviemaker) Documentary may invoke the symbolic but fiction would be much more inclined to do so. By making a film about a people that is ethnographic in its enquiry, its symbolism can give it an added patina of the fictional. Yet this symbolism would be intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic: images that conjure up a specific culture rather than general symbols that films often use to transcend cultural specificity: birds symbolising freedom, water, baptism, red, danger; green envy and so on. 

A film might not even deliberately put them in there to signify symbolism, yet so often are they read culturally as symbolic, this will be how a viewer may interpret them, even if the images are practically present and needn’t be read connotatively. In Moonlight, the central character learns how to swim and does so, unsurprisingly, in water. But that won’t stop critics seeing in it symbolism, and they may be right to do so, but so general a symbol is water, and so integrated into the pragmatics of the plot happens to be the scene, that there is no need to read anything more into it than what is there. 

   With the buffalo in War Pony this isn’t the case. Billy sees it early on and Matho much later, but what both see is a figment of their imagination and so we are inclined to read into it meaning based on the absence of its pragmatic function.The puppy needn’t serve the same role because it is integrated into the plot — we may view it symbolically if we like, but its plot purpose needn’t insist we do so. Whether the use of the buffalo makes the film heavy-handed or not is up to the individual viewer to decide, but it isn’t literal - and it is culturally specific. It asks to be read and can best be understood through the boys’ comprehension of its symbolic purpose in their environment. While a more plot-driven film might conclude with a death that tells them that they are in danger, the directors propose that they should listen to a sign that isn’t a practical outcome of the story, but an aspect of ancient wisdom that they ought not so much to learn but re-learn. They need to understand that the material world where they busy themselves with schemes that go wrong ought to be secondary to a sagacity that links them to their milieu.

       Some might insist this is all very well coming from Gemmell and Keough, the latter the granddaughter of none other than Elvis Presley, perhaps the most famous and successful American singer of the 20th century.  (No matter if Presley was said to have Cherokee blood.)  But as Keough said, “there was a moment when we thought, ‘This is a little bit scary, and maybe we shouldn’t do it. And so we kind of pumped the brakes on it. But ultimately, we’d put in so much work and our writers had put in so much work, and they’re indigenous and this is about their lives.” (The Wrap) Better perhaps than insisting on cultural appropriation, to see War Pony as an attempt to broaden still further the legitimate presence of Native American culture on screen. In an important essay written in 1973, John A Price looked at the history of the Native American in film and noted that steadily the presentations had improved. "While in a film serial from the 1930s the Indians were given a language by running their normal English dialogue backwards”  (‘The Stereotyping of North American Indians in Motion Pictures’), John Ford westerns of the late forties and fifties offered some nuance and specificity. While for years whites were frequently cast in Native American Indian parts, in 1966 An Indian Actors Guild was formed in Los Angeles “to promote the use of Native people in Native roles, to promote the training of Indians in trick riding and other horseman skills, and to promote the teaching of dramatic skills to Indian” (‘The Stereotyping of North American Indians in Motion Pictures’) Price could see that by the early 1970s, films including Hombre, Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here, A Man Called Horse and Little Big Man were portraying the American Indian with far more fidelity and respect than hitherto, and that would continue with later films like Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals and Killers of the Flower Moon. Yet War Pony more than most has put Indigenous Americans at the centre of the story and has even been willing to forgo much of what passes for narrative in concentrating on the specifics of the characters' lives.


© Tony McKibbin