Review of The Mustang (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

The Mustang excels at positioning itself equal parts horse movie and incarceration drama. It resists tidy endings and anodyne backstories, stereotypical genre speeches, or lazy cinematography that leans heavily on money shot horse close ups. The prison is set in the Nevada desert, which makes for a slightly Martian backdrop for a jailhouse, but perfect for the wide open spaces, dramatic storms, and dusty atmosphere of a rustic man-meets-horse story. A few more details about some of the interesting decisions after the jump:

The delay in the story of why Roman Coleman’s in prison is a nice touch. The audience spends a lot of time like the prison psychologist, staring into his cipher of a face, pleading with him to indicate that he’s listening, that he has opinions, preferences, feelings. The slow disarmament of his defenses around his horse, the visual and emotive parallelism of the wild mustang’s imprisonment and taming works well. The pounding on the cramped holding cell doors of the mustang and the knocking on the walls of the SHU are juxtaposed, but never feel like the film is trying to personify the horse so much as clarify the complicated and ineffable tangle of emotions that Coleman is trying to work through silently.

Coleman’s reasoning about his incarceration is flawed (everything that happened was an accident), and this lack of clarity is a hallmark of a film and filmmaker who are unwilling to let characters benefit from the audience’s sympathy, supplementing the messiness of emotional growth and the agony of guilt with the story’s focalized narrative. Coleman is clearly not ready or able to account for his part in it after twelve years, or maybe he is but his silence is cryptic. When Coleman tearfully promises to his daughter Martha “I’m gonna make it up to you somehow,” his words are received reluctantly and without warmth, a surrogate for our own hesitation, a canary for our own attachment to this protagonist. (Gideon Adlon, previously of Blockers fame, is one of my very favorite young actors and I am so excited to see her future projects.).

Wife says it’s tragic the way that he sacrifices himself to save the horse, putting himself in prison for even longer, and showing how complicated his promise to his daughter truly is. Because Coleman is looking for Martha, he isn’t paying attention to his horse. This prevents him from having the fairy tale ending he’s looking for and instead brings an end to the program, his own rehabilitation, and his ticket to redemption with his daughter. Maybe Martha is right when she says in her letter, “I thought it was my fault, that the reason you didn’t get parole was that I was a bad writer. It was only once I was older that I realized, You didn’t want to get out.”.

So much is left open-ended: the way that Coleman goes unpunished for his retribution on his cell mate, the fact that the daughter goes away unscathed after the bald threat from his cellie. The film is not interested with arcs, but rather with descriptions and images. The pledge of allegiance played out fully at the horse auction, the refuse left behind in the kitchen after the sandstorm, the backdrop of a tropical vacation in a photograph.

The Slate article calling this the “golden age of horse movies” did a lot of the work in getting me into the theater. I hope you have a chance to see it too.