War Pony

Who has the right to play stew­ard to some­one else’s sto­ry? It’s an unavoid­able ques­tion in the con­ver­sa­tion sur­round­ing War Pony, a slice-of-life work of neo­re­al­ism set on the Pine Ridge reser­va­tion in South Dako­ta, per­formed by non-pro­fes­sion­al actors cribbed from the Oglala Lako­ta com­mu­ni­ty, and intend­ed to broad­cast the real­i­ties of its milieu to a wider audi­ence with­out sug­ar­coat­ing or gawk­ing at its coars­er aspects. It’s a dicey under­tak­ing for the tyro direc­to­r­i­al team of Gina Gam­mell and Riley Keough, the lat­ter weigh­ing her lap-of-lux upbring­ing against her Chero­kee and Creek her­itage bequeathed via her mater­nal grand­fa­ther (Elvis Presley).

But she’s appro­pri­ate­ly self-con­scious about the whiff of nepo­tism she gives off, and she’s done every­thing in her pow­er to super­sede it on this well-mea­sured, qua­si-ethno­graph­i­cal look at a lit­tle-depict­ed cor­ner of Amer­i­ca. She and Gam­mell have joined forces with cred­it­ed co-scriptwrit­ers Bill Red­dy and Franklin Sioux Bob, a pair Keough met and bond­ed with as day play­ers dur­ing the shoot for the sim­i­lar­ly loose, trou­ble­mak­ing Amer­i­can Hon­ey.

We get the lay of the land by fol­low­ing two of its typ­i­cal res­i­dents, the tweenaged Matho (LaDain­ian Crazy Thun­der) and the old­er Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whit­ing), grown enough to have sired a cou­ple bounc­ing baby boys with dif­fer­ent yet equal­ly fed-up-with-his-shit local girls. Despite the dif­fer­ence in their ages, our pro­tag­o­nists do a lot of the same stuff: dick around with their bud­dies; get high enough to for­get how bor­ing their town is; make mon­ey how­ev­er they can. Meth has infest­ed the area’s crowd­ed split-lev­el homes, though Matho and Bill both know enough to posi­tion them­selves on the more lucra­tive, less lethal side of the deal­er-user dichotomy.

Each one faces a mod­est help­ing of tribu­la­tion that stops short of the nar­ra­tive pun­ish­ments often heaped upon char­ac­ters like this in com­pa­ra­ble films. Matho gets smacked around by the dad who doesn’t think twice about shar­ing a blunt with his bare­ly ado­les­cent son, both behav­iours left un-judged by an obser­vant cam­era reluc­tant to stylise.

Bill works for a sleaze­bag white farm own­er whose pal­pa­ble racism nev­er over­reach­es into a the­atri­cal reg­is­ter, even if the writ­ing for his wine-slug­ging wife skirts the lead­en vil­lainy bless­ed­ly absent from the rest of the film. A con­fronta­tion regard­ing Bill’s labour around the turkey fac­to­ry comes clos­est to break­ing with the care­ful nat­u­ral­ism, but that’s eas­i­ly over­looked in light of the cathar­tic cli­max it cues up for later.

Ulti­mate­ly, that’s the great­est virtue of Keough and Gammell’s approach: col­lab­o­ra­tion, the abil­i­ty to decen­tralise their own per­spec­tives and be sub­sumed by some­one else’s. For Keough in par­tic­u­lar — who’s put as much space as pos­si­ble between her­self and the upper crust into which she was born by bring­ing depth to ​‘white trash’ with her Amer­i­can Hon­ey and Zola roles — it feels like the cul­mi­na­tion of a life­long project that’s only just begin­ning in earnest.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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