![]() An initially poignant conversation about God with Nathan, whose mother Sandra learns is an organist like hers, abruptly turns sour - a twist that’s revealing of the role race has in guiding their interactions. ![]() Sandra decides to follow the two men after another day of hunting, learning more about their lives and community. When the writing moves away from these blunter tendencies and settles into peeling back layers of Sandra’s personality and relationship to this town, God’s Country is much more effective. But the backstory, revealed all at once, coupled with her sporadically shown fight to diversify her department (much to the chagrin of her colleague Arthur, played by Kai Lennox), makes Sandra seem more like a symbol than a person. The purpose, I suppose, is to make Sandra more three-dimensional. Their already fractured relationship barely survived the move. She moved north with her mother, a woman of the church who abhorred cold weather, to take this tenure-track position at a university staffed with mostly white people. ![]() Higgins and Ogbonna stuff the narrative with a well-intentioned but unwieldy backstory that registers as misaligned with the direction of Sandra’s character: She used to be a police officer in New Orleans but left the city after Hurricane Katrina, which made her realize the ease with which the city could abandon its Black residents and the futility of her role in the force. It’s disappointing, then, when the screenplay doesn’t always reflect that same level of trust or subtlety. A few overacted moments don’t dampen the performance’s general restraint as Sandra relishes one-upping her opponents and grieves her mother, with whom she had a complicated relationship. Newton renders Sandra’s rage delicately, intimately. Sandra sees the hunters’ provocations as an extension of a familiar transgression - the world’s disrespect for Black women - and has no problem taking matters into her own hands. While the short story’s narrative wrestled with its retired college professor protagonist’s masculinity, the film ambitiously injects racial, gender and geographical tensions into the mix, to uneven, but nonetheless exciting effect. Higgins and Shaye Ogbonna’s screenplay amplifies the thematic undercurrents of “Winter Lights” by making its central character a New Orleans-born middle-aged Black woman. But the professor insists they act, so the duo drive to confront the hunters, initiating the next level of their war. The particular politics of this rural town, composed of white and Indigenous people - many of whom hate the police - make the sheriff as much of an outsider as Sandra. He sympathetically listens to her case before suggesting that she handle the dispute with the men herself. Sandra, polite and firm, urges them to find another way.Īfter Nathan and Samuel shoot an arrow into Sandra’s door in retaliation for her towing their car, she calls the police - or, in this case, Gus Wolf (Jeremy Bobb), the acting local sheriff. They came to hunt, and cutting through her property offers the easiest route to the forest. On day 2, Sandra confronts the two men, Nathan (a riveting Joris Jarsky) and Samuel ( Yellowstone’s Jefferson White), who feign ignorance about her note. As in Burke’s short story, the conflict is a war of attrition, with each party’s move escalating the stakes of the dispute. ![]() So begins a quiet and vicious week-long feud between Sandra and these strangers. Screenwriters: Shaye Ogbonna, Julian Higgins Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)Ĭast: Thandiwe Newton, Jeremy Bobb, Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White, Kai Lennox, Tanaya Beatty ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |