Review: War Pony

Directors:  Riley Keough, Gina Gammell

Stars:  Jojo Bapteise Whiting, LaDainian Crazy Thunder, Sprague Hollander

On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, everything comes at a price. Even forgiveness is transactional. It is a culture that has grown from devaluation; a community that has been subsumed by drugs, poverty and the twin desperations those things cultivate. Much like the notorious ghettos of LA and other American cities, there is a prevailing sense of a people having been failed by their country. Deliberately kept down, even.

Having befriended extras Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy on the shoot for Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (a clear influence here), indie darling nepo baby Riley Keough was inspired to show us these neighbourhoods, rarely visited on film. Co-directed with her friend and fellow newcomer Gina Gammell, War Pony is derived – in the oral tradition – from telling stories.

The focus here is a two-pronged narrative inspired by the two men’s life experiences. Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) is a 23-year-old with two kids by different mothers, one of whom needs bail money having been picked up on a driving offence. A hustler but also a hard worker, Bill sees dollar signs in the potential for breeding a pedigree poodle he names Beast. A chance encounter on the highway also leads him into the orbit of Tim (Sprague Hollander), a white farm owner who promises Bill work, while also using him to ferry reservation girls back and forth from various rendezvous haunts.

Concurrently we also have 12-year-old Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder), old beyond his years, already smoking and dealing whenever he can scam product from his father. Matho runs with a gang of kids his own age – fellow delinquents – and his story charts a series of losses and misadventures that see him slowly swallowed by the endemic neglect of his surroundings.

Working closely with the community where these stories originated, shooting on location there, and utilising these same non-actors to populate their film, Keough and Gammell have managed to sidestep a sense of cultural exploitation from their process of examining cultural exploitation. War Pony feels collaborative. Feels like an opportunity for marginalised voices to have their say even if, by necessity or happenstance, the directors are from outside the community.

The resulting work cleaves close to a certain subset of social realist films, including Arnold’s aforementioned travelogue. Because of the perpetual input of the community it represents, it escapes a sense of existing ‘above’ them (even if Matho’s story comes close to feeling like a hand-wringing cautionary tale, one must remember that it is, after all, drawn from real-life anecdotes). In terms of form, there’s no reinventing the wheel here. Gammell and Keough opt for a vérité style to enhance that sense of lived-in reality, peppered with the occasional Malickian grace notes that proffer moments of transcendency. In both modes they exhibit confidence, skill and restraint.

In spite of some dire living conditions, War Pony exhibits hope (albeit failing hope) in many forms. For Bill – and many others – hope is intrinsically connected to profit. Money = freedom, and Beast comes to symbolise his dreams of getting out of his circumstances. For the younger Matho, the idea of magic – genuine magic – still holds sway, and watching him put away childish things as life wears on him is its own lightly feathered tragedy.

With a realist philosophy in place, War Pony largely rejects traditional narrative structures, though there is a sense of tense build in it’s final act, largely taking place on one fateful Halloween night. Nevertheless because of its relative fluidity it can feel hard to locate yourself on the film’s compass. A great little mid-point montage pushes us forward through time and resets the board, but gauging when and how it’s going to end becomes ephemeral. One might argue that, overall, it could be tighter, but there’s little that feels excessive.

Perhaps sensing that their beautiful, honest film can punish through this sense of shapelessness, Gammell and Keough employ a rousing second montage toward the film’s close, where War Pony suddenly blasts into another mode, briefly playing out like a lost Soderbergh heist movie. It’s a great, crowd-pleasing section, judiciously implemented. Much more of this might have sharply changed the tone of the whole.

A number of pressure points for this community are touched on. One appreciates the ignorance and microaggressions that indigenous peoples are still subjected to, even if the film’s white characters remain (rightly) marginal. The pervasive air of Trump’s America is filtered into the text for wider political context. The cultural collisions of traditional Lakota practices with the modern problems of US sub-working class culture exist everywhere here, even if they’re not often directly centralised.

Impressive throughout are the relatively inexperienced cast. Bapteise Whiting has the wherewithal spirit of fringe fore-bearers Sasha Lane or Leo Fitzpatrick, while the younger cast members recall the nuanced wonders found in the fourth season of The Wire – a pertinent point of reference for both form and subject matter.

Gammell and Keough have harnessed the assets in the community. Their warts-and-all document is not intended as manipulative misery porn, juggling numerous highs and lows, while little here feels callously orchestrated or contrived. It is a representative piece.  One would like to see more windows into this world coming from native voices as US independent cinema takes hold of a renewed ambition to invoke change through the sharing of stories and the funnelling of ideas. War Pony is a strong and emotive debut for many.