Most of the middle road reviewed movies have high floors and low ceilings. They’re simple affairs, designed to be in & out in 100ish minutes more as an excuse to be in air conditioning in the summer or heating in the winter. Americana is one of the messy middle: it’s got highest of high ambitions…with sometimes the lowest of low delivery of them. Ultimately Americana is likely to leave you mad: mad at the movie’s choices, and even madder at what might have been…if we had just one more hard pass at the story.
Because the setup is a potent one. A woman named Mandy Starr (Halsey) has ended up in a dead end life, forced into an abusive relationship with Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane) in a podunk South Datoka town near a Native American reservation. She stays because of her younger brother Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), who has no one else but Mandy. One day, Mandy musters up the courage to fight back against Dillion, taking his car and going on the run, forced to leave Cal behind since the TV he loves has made the boy enamored with Native American culture nearby. Cal walks to the local tribe, led by Hank “Ghost Eye” Spears (Zahn McClarnon). Others enter this story too, like a stuttering waitress named Penny Jo Poplin (Sydney Sweeney), a dimwitted ex war vet Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), and Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), a local antiques owner.
Americana goes the Michael Clayton route with it’s story, starting in the middle, and flashing backwards, working to the present. The best stuff in here is Tony Tost’s world building, laying out the major players. The setup makes it clear we’re heading for a showdown, but Americana doesn’t really need it, and would have been better as a vignette movie about the modern American West. The Penny Jo/Lefty section is one of the best mini romcoms of the year, in 20 minutes immediately swooning the audience on their connection and characters. Mandy’s mini movie paints a nice twist on the Western woman, and all the pitfalls and cliff’s edges she has to navigate to barely get to even a semblance of a life. And Hank’s life on the reservation mimic’s Reservation Dogs, completely demythologizing the mysticism of Native American culture as White movies/TV have done to it.
But Tost elects to weave each miniature tale into a larger one, hoping Americana lives up to that majestic title. The buildup and showdown is epic enough; a converged climax for all our vignettes. But this is where commerce has to rear it’s ugly head. Any ideas the movie lays bare in the beginning have to work inside the framework of the most “entertaining” outcome for the audience, as laid out by the producers. This means the end of our movie should be with one obvious character inside this story, but instead, the film decides to leave it with someone else, completely undercutting its message. It’s supposed to be this beautiful sad emotional moment…for me, it’s near infuriating, as the real sadness lies with someone else, whom the movie sidelines instead of uplifting.
I’ve tried to not spoil Americana for you. Yes, the ending is frustrating, but the first hour or so is VERY interesting and has some really interesting ideas it throws out there. Not least of which are the 5 big leads proved their top level casting. Halsey was in a big horror release; Simon Rex was in one of the best movies of the decade so far; Sydney Sweeney showed she can inhabit a reality character; Paul Walter Hauser has been the best part of several films; and Zahn McClarnon was the key figure in one of the best seasons of TV of all time. And they readily give their all here, making the movie worth watching on their own.