War Pony
Riley Keough and Gina Gammell explore the everyday reality of life in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.
The path that led to this film being made is clearly defined. When Riley Keough was in South Dakota in 2015 acting in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, she became friendly with two of the extras on that film, Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, who were living in the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Keough, along with her friend Gina Gammell, developed that contact so that all four became friends and then collaborators working together on a screenplay that drew on the two men's own experiences and knowledge of life. That screenplay grew into War Pony, a work set up with non-professional actors and a local crew and one aimed at being an authentic portrait of contemporary life among the Lakota people.
This collaboration has yielded a film with two central characters. One is Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), a 23-year-old who has not been able to find a way in life despite having fathered two sons by two women. Although he has real feelings for his second girlfriend, Echo (Jesse Schmockel), his first is now in jail and Echo is unconvinced by his optimistic talk of changing and finding a promising future. If Bill’s purchase of a poodle leads to scenes which express his tender feelings for the animal, having a scheme to make money by selling off its puppies is typical of what Bill does. But, more significantly, being an opportunist, Bill seeks to take advantage of a chance encounter with an outsider, Tim (Sprague Hollander), who could give him work because he runs a turkey processing plant in Fall River. However, talking Tim into employing him means doing other jobs for Tim as well, such as driving under-age girls from the reservation back and forth at his request. Quite apart from Tim having a wife (Ashley Shelton), Bill recognises that there is a serious moral issue here, but this is part of the deal for becoming one of Tim's employees and other work is hard to get.
The other leading figure in War Pony is younger than Bill: he is a 12-year-old boy named Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) who is in danger of falling into delinquency being drawn to petty criminality and drug dealing, the latter including sales of meth that he has stolen from what his often-absent father (Franklin Sioux Bob) has stashed away. When dad discovers this, he turns on Matho and casts him out. Later the boy’s school suspends him and, left to his own devices, his prospects look increasingly bleak as he and his friends steal a car.
If this description of War Pony suggests two distinct stories, that is indeed what we get here – but rather than one following the other they are intertwined. Each is developed in turn in mainly short scenes and, particularly for viewers not expecting that, this certainly requires adjustment (the two stories only truly converge in the final scenes of the film). Despite never being confusing once the format is understood, continually jumping back-and-forth in this way does to some extent limit the degree of involvement that a single, flowing narrative would encourage. On the other hand, given that both stories concentrate on small-scale everyday details, mixing the two does provide variety and that is helpful since in any case the material does come to feel rather overstretched due to the film lasting close on two hours.
The most successful aspect of War Pony lies in its tone (the film is nonjudgmental and never sentimentalises the material by softening up the elements of bad behaviour) and in its splendidly natural performances, not least those by young LaDainian Crazy Thunder and by Jojo Bapteise Whiting, the latter particularly striking and adept at making one hope Bill’s better instincts will win out. Nevertheless, it is not only the arguably excessive length that disappoints here. Both tales convince but one might have expected more elements specific to the Lakota people in view of the film’s intended aim. The fact is that Matho’s story is in many ways akin to that told about another boy of comparable age in the Truffaut classic Les quatre cents coups (1959) and that Bill’s situation is also one that could just as well be located in another setting entirely. A few details that are indeed local do appear but they may not be fully recognised (I am told that the bison, an animal seen twice in the film, has special traditional meaning for the Lakota people but did not appreciate this from the film itself).
However, if I add that the sympathetic view of young people in difficult conditions reminded me of Sean Baker’s splendid 2017 film The Florida Project, that is certainly to the film’s credit. Nevertheless, while the film’s naturalistic manner seems absolutely right, I find altogether less persuasive the heightened tone found late on and present both in the music score and in plotting which, in reaching a positive conclusion, seems contrived to do just that. All told, then, it's a bit of a mixed bag, especially if one has doubts about the effectiveness of the double narrative. A single tale worked well enough when in 2015 Chloé Zhao made Songs My Brothers Taught Me, a film in many respects comparable to this one even down to being located in the very same Native American reservation. For all that, War Pony deserves respect and for Jojo Bapteise Whiting especially it is something of a triumph.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Jojo Bapteise Whiting, LaDainian Crazy Thunder, Jesse Schmockel, Sprague Hollander, Ashley Shelton, Wilma Colhoff, Iona Red Bear, Franklin Sioux Bob, Anjelio Aurora, Jeremy Corbin Cottier.
Dir Gina Gammell and Riley Keough, Pro Riley Keough, Gina Gammell, Willi White, Bert Hamelinck, Sacha Ben Harroche, Ryan Zacarias, Salim El Arja, Bear Damen and Val Abel, Screenplay Franklin Sioux Bob, Bill Reddy, Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, Ph David Gallego, Pro Des Scott Dougan, Ed Affonso Gonçalves and Eduardo Serrano, Music Christopher Stracey and Mato Wayuhi, Costumes Miyako Bellizzi and Alex Lee.
Felix Culpa/Caviar/Protagonist Pictures/Quickfire Films/Ward Four/Centauri/Kaleidoscope Entertainment-Picturehouse Entertainment.
115 mins. USA/UK. 2022. UK Rel: 9 June 2023. US Rel: 28 July 2023. Cert. 15.
