Set in South Dakota near the picturesque Badlands and the nondescript town of Wall with its tacky tourist trap Wall Drug, “East of Wall” is like one of the difficult horses at the center of its story: hard to get a handle on. At least initially.
An evocative opening montage lays out an expansive western landscape across which a teenage girl rides. Interspersing equestrian scenes with less glamorous shots of trashed trailers, the rhythm of cinematic images gives way to seemingly random cellphone videos, made for TikTok, that we gradually learn are the marketing tools of its central character. She’s a kind of horse whisperer — some call her a witch — named Tabatha Zimiga, which is also the name of the actress who plays her (a nonprofessional, like many in this docufictional feature debut of writer-director Kate Beecroft).
Tabatha is a trainer and trader of horses that no one else wants or sees the potential in. She has insight and a generosity of spirit that she also brings to bear on the large, unruly brood of young people who live with her: her biological children Stetson (Stetson Neumann), a speech-delayed 3-year-old; teens Skylar (Wyatt Mansfield) and Porshia (Porshia Zimiga); as well as several other stray adolescents she has taken in.
With half of her head shaved and the other half cascading peroxide-blond locks that fall past her Madonna lip piercing and elaborate neck tattoo, Tabatha is a kind of cow-punk earth mother. Her performance, along with that of her real-life daughter Porshia — a wild-child rodeo prodigy whose relationship with her mother propels this loosely fact-based nouveau western — is a feat of mesmerizing offhandedness.
At times, the mother and daughter’s naturalness only makes the trained actors in the cast stand out like sore thumbs. Scoot McNairy is fine as Roy, a wealthy cowboy businessman who’s come from Fort Worth seeking redemption for past sins and healing of family trauma. Roy recognizes Tabatha’s gift for reading horses and pressures her to sell her ranch so he can harness her horse-reading magic at the auction houses. But Jennifer Ehle, as Tabatha’s skeptical, weatherworn mother Tracey, sounds overly mannered and actorly at times, especially when Beecroft gives her lines like this to say to Roy (spoken between long drags on an ever-present cigarette and sips of housemade peach moonshine): “Don’t step on the necks of my girls when you’re trying to reach for that honor you’re talking about.”
Beecroft’s screenplay — which the actor turned filmmaker wrote after moving in with Tabatha and Porshia, off and on, for three years — is not as strong as her visual storytelling. Some of her dialogue trips over its own bootlaces.
At times, the narrative can also feel like eavesdropping on group therapy. One scene in particular features several women — Tabatha, Tracey and others, with Porshia hiding in the shadows to listen in — sitting around a campfire. Confessions of partner abuse and the revelation of two violent Zimiga family secrets, one of which Beecroft has been dropping hints about since the beginning of the film, lend the story a gloss of melodrama. It feels out of place against what is otherwise the film’s refreshing naturalism.
It also seems a potential missed opportunity that Beecroft makes no inference about the ready availability of firearms, though both skeletons in the Zimiga family’s closet involved guns. Perhaps paradoxically, that is to the film’s credit: “East of Wall” does not judge its subjects in any way.
The film’s message — that, unlike her horses, Tabatha can’t be bought — lands with an effective, if predictable punch. Yet there’s also something a little too tidy about the way Beecroft ties up all the emotional threads. One early scene features a speech therapist (Cheryl Walker) counseling Tabatha about Stetson’s development. The boy’s delays, the therapist tells her, could be the result of a chaotic home life.
And, wow, is Tabatha’s life a shambles, in almost every way. It’s a chaos, however, that feels like life, not cinema. If “East of Wall” celebrates anything, it’s a kind of beautiful anarchy.
Why, then, does the movie have to end on such a note of Hollywood happily-ever-after? It resonates with a tinny clang, doing a disservice to the symphonic mess that came before.
R. At area theaters. Contains coarse language throughout, frequent smoking, vaping and drinking (some involving teens) and mature thematic material, including suicide. 97 minutes.
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