Sightlines · a viewing thread

The Frontier's Long Shadow

A run of American myths going to seed — outlaws, oilmen, and foreclosed ranchers set against big country that outlasts them all; watch them close together and the classic Western slowly dissolves into its elegiac modern kin.

Mostly well-loved and critically canonized — with a couple of genuine crowd-pleasers (3:10 to Yuma, Hell or High Water) sitting beside film-school essentials — but The Assassination of Jesse James and especially The Tree of Life are slow, painterly, and demanding, best saved for a patient evening.

• There Will Be Blood (2007)
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
• 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
• Hell or High Water (2016)
• The Last Picture Show (1971)
• The Tree of Life (2011)
• Days of Heaven (1978) — The overlooked Malick that The Tree of Life grew straight out of — Texas-panhandle wheat harvests shot at magic hour, the same aching sense of vast land outlasting the drifters who labor across it; if that one held you, this is the earlier gem to finally pull down.
• Wind River (2017) — Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, who scripted Hell or High Water — snowbound Wyoming, a Native woman dead miles from anywhere, the frontier's long shadow fallen across a reservation nobody's watching; the under-seen one that rhymes exactly with these modern Westerns.
• In Cold Blood (1967) — Two drifters driving across Kansas to rob and then slaughter a farm family — the same American violence that runs through Jesse James and There Will Be Blood, rendered in stark elegiac black-and-white; the heartland murder ballad you meant to get to.
• True Grit (2010) — The Coens' revenge ride into Indian Territory with its melancholy grown-old coda — a classic Western told straight but already dissolving into elegy, the accessible one that sits comfortably beside 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit's kin here.