A stuttering waitress who longs to make it big as a singer in Nashville; a wounded veteran named Lefty who awkwardly proposes to just about any woman willing to date him; a child convinced, perhaps by too much time spent in front of the TV, that he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull; a dealer of looted Indigenous artifacts; and a cadre of politically radicalized Native Americans eager to reclaim their people’s relics.
These are just some of the characters populating “Americana,” a slick and skillful debut feature from the writer-director Tony Tost. Compared to “Eddington,” this summer’s other tongue-in-cheek neo-western, the movie, ostensibly set in South Dakota, is less aggressive in its efforts to appear topical; it may not even have much on its mind beyond clever plot construction. But watching its pieces snap into place is more fun.
Adopting a chaptered, time-scrambling structure that shamelessly evokes Quentin Tarantino, the film follows its ensemble of eccentrics as they coalesce — some wittingly, some not — around a valuable Lakota garment that the artifact dealer (Simon Rex) is hoping to steal and then sell for $500,000. The shirt is ill-gotten from the time the story begins, at least if the story is considered chronologically. The item starts its journey in the hands of a wealthy art collector who is introduced obnoxiously explaining its historical value to his bored party guests — who are then slaughtered, shockingly and bloodily, by hired guns rampaging through the home’s modernist decor.
Class is a motif, of sorts. Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), the boy who thinks he’s Sitting Bull, eventually teams up with Ghost Eye (a scene-stealing Zahn McClarnon), a Native American who leads a group called the Red Thunder Society and is a devoted reader of Marx. Ghost Eye warns Cal, who is white but keeps talking about how he will lead tribal members to avenge past wrongs and remember their “old ways,” that this “ain’t exactly the golden age of cultural appropriation.”
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