kerry pechter

This film had nothing interesting or definite to say about America, people or anything. It's a fictionalized version on a non-fiction book. It had none of the emotional pleasures of fiction and none of the surprises of non-fiction. It just doesn't work, except in terms of landscape cinematography. There's a sustained mood, but the mood has no content or articulation. The viewer strains to read Frances McDormand's face but the movie ends before she really tells us anything. I've lived in the American West. This didn't even capture the West. Its version of America was normalized and sanitized in a way that seemed tone deaf at a time when people are sacking the US Capitol building.