Americana Falls Flat

There are some films that try so hard and kick up so much dust trying to create an impact that, when they fall flat, you feel a bit embarrassed to have been a witness, especially in a public place like a movie theater. At the end, when the credits roll at last, you say to yourself, “Welp,” and stand up and skulk out of there grateful for the cover of darkness. Americana is one of those films.

It’s what is now called a neo-Western, and like the other neo-Western currently playing in theaters, Eddington, it’s very much influenced by the twenty-first-century fount of the subgenre, No Country for Old Men (2007). Scrabbling mightily to be a Coen brothers film, Americana folds in a lot of Fargo as well in its attempts to be violent and funny about an escalating series of bloody crimes that characterize the American experience in telling ways. But you’ve got to have awfully good pitch to strike the right notes in such an endeavor, and writer-director Tony Tost just doesn’t have it.

When he’s not trying to make a Coen brothers film, he’s trying to make a Quentin Tarantino film. So there are named and numbered chapters that favor different points of view and a lot of relentless bantering among oddballs before the shooting starts.

Tost has got some slick skills though, and the movie looks handsome and features some good performances, some nice scenes, and some fancy technical flourishes here and there. It just doesn’t add up to anything very memorable.

Americana is about the wild attempts of a motley bunch of South Dakotan characters to get ahold of a rare Native American artifact, a Lakota ghost shirt. It starts off in a glass case, featured as a rich and obnoxious collector’s prized home exhibit. The collector (Toby Huss) recites the lore behind it to his bored wine-drinking guests, and in his telling, it seems the Lakota tribe, who once owned the very land they’re drinking wine on, had been defeated in battle and relegated to reservations, but it was waiting for aid in the form of the return of Jesus Christ on Earth. The tribe figured Jesus would definitely be on its side and would obliterate the white settlers, sparing only the Lakota who were wearing ghost shirts.

The collector values the ghost shirt at half a million dollars. A local dealer named Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), who bills himself as the foremost buyer and seller of Native American artifacts in the West, is determined to get his hands on it. He plans to hire a couple of ignorant goons and pay them chump change to steal the ghost shirt for him. The goons, led by Dylan (Eric Dane), meet him in the local diner to seal the deal and grouse about Roy Lee’s arriving late before agreeing to take on the job, in a direct reference to the opening scene in Fargo.

They don’t realize that the waitress working in that diner, Penny Jo (Sydney Sweeney), has gotten wind of this deal and joined forces with a lonely small-time rancher named Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser) to eavesdrop on the meeting and glean the necessary information to steal the ghost shirt themselves. She has dreams of financing a singing career for herself in Nashville, which will allow her to escape from her abusive mother’s house, though she stammers so badly she’s too shy to sing even for Lefty alone.

Lefty’s a simple soul and a head-injured veteran of the war in Afghanistan who’s proposed to four women already this year. He always makes the same long, humble speech he’s mostly memorized, with the aid of index cards as emergency reminders. The women have all turned him down, but Penny seems nice, so he’s willing to throw in with her Nashville dream.

There’s so much ruthlessness and so many different kinds of desperation at work in the culture, soon everybody’s stealing the ghost shirt from everybody else as the body count rises astronomically. Dylan’s girlfriend, Mandy (Halsey), who’s finally had enough of his vicious temper and hard-scrabble life with him in a double-wide trailer, takes off in Dylan’s orange muscle car that has the ghost shirt in the trunk. She tries to bring her nine-year-old son, Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), with her, but he’s dealing with his miserable childhood by convincing himself he’s the reincarnation of the great Lakota chief Sitting Bull, based on his TV viewing of old Westerns. Cal refuses to leave his sacred land and his true people.

But his true people don’t give him a very warm welcome when he shows up at the meeting place of the radical Red Thunder Society, led by Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon). Ghost Eye quotes Karl Marx and borrows strategies from the Black Panthers. He cautions Cal to put a lid on that Sitting Bull stuff because “this ain’t exactly the golden age of cultural appropriation.” But Ghost Eye is glad to get the info about the stolen ghost shirt, which is the Lakota’s rightful property and must be retrieved by any means necessary.

All the interested parties converge on Mandy’s destination: a religious enclave surrounded by gun-toting rednecks in the Wyoming woods where she grew up. Her father is the creepy white-haired patriarch who’s made himself a ruler over his extended family of followers. Mandy only wants a temporary hideout to escape from Dylan, but while she’s there, she’s compelled to exchange her tough rocker-chick appearance and demeanor for the drab pioneer-woman clothing and submissive behaviors of one of the “sister wives.” There the stage is set for the final showdown.

Tost would’ve done better if he hadn’t attempted to arrive at a place of larger emotional resonance at the end, post-mayhem. Something comparable, I mean, to Marge Gunderson’s baffled “I just don’t understand it” speech in Fargo, or Ed Tom Bell’s devastating dream of the lost romance of the Western hero at the end of No Country for Old Men. Because nothing is more exposing than the big attempt at meaning and poignance that doesn’t come off. But Americana is so derivative a film — even the title is tellingly generic — it makes sense that it would stay stuck on the dusty flatlands when it’s trying hardest to soar.