It’s been almost three years since Americana premiered at the 2023 South by Southwest Film and TV Festival in March of that year. Since then, three of the main cast members have had their careers explode.
I had never seen Euphoria and didn’t recognize Sydney Sweeney from Sharp Objects when I saw her in Reality. One thing I will say is that she has been impressive as a young actress. Despite her body shape and a silly controversy over an American Eagle ad last year, she’s had an impressive filmography. I don’t blame her for some bad choices like Madame Web. She’s young and sometimes younger actors listen too much to their agents and managers rather than their own intuitions.
She’s no different than Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Scarlett Johansson and even Marilyn Monroe who have to prove they’re not just eye candy. Here she shares the screen with Paul Walter Hauser and Zahn McClarnon, two actors who have moved from character actors to bigger names since this movie went into production during the winter of 2022. And her hole here as a Penny Jo Poplin who suffers from a stammer but has dreams of being a Nashville musician makes her probably the most three-dimensional character in this movie. She’s the only one who seems like a real human.
Hauser plays Lefty Ledbetter who is a constant customer to the small-town South Dakota diner where she works as a waitress. He’s infatuated with her and hilariously proposes marriage which she rebuffs. But they get closer and he becomes her partner in crime when she sees a napkin with a meeting time on it at the diner. Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) is a shady Western antiques dealer who hires two petty criminals, Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane) and Fun Dave (Joe Adler), to steal a Lakota ghost shirt from a wealthy collector Pendleton Duvall (Toby Huss).
Of course, everything goes wrong and there are double-crosses. Tony Tost, who co-created the show Poker Face, seems to want to make a neo-Western crime thriller but throws in too many characters with too many subplots that leaves you wanting to know more about the characters. But the gun battles ensues.
McClarnon plays Ghost Eye, the leader of a militant Lakota group who wants to get the shirt as well and stop all cultural appropriation as possible. Needless to say, he finds himself having to deal with Cal Starr (Gavin Maddox Bergman), the son of Dillon’s girlfriend who thinks he’s the reincarnate of Sitting Bull.
Yeah, it’s as silly as it’s sounds and the young actor doesn’t really sell it in a way that it would be acceptable. Tost seems to be inspired by the works of Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers and the early works of John Diehl. But he can’t really make a cohesive story. The narrative isn’t linear and it’s divided into five chapters like a QT movie. But when the movie seems to focus more on Call’s mother, Mandy Starr (Halsey), I felt like Tost had jumbled a lot of failed scripts into one.
Apparently, Mandy escaped a white-supremacy religious radical compound across the border in Wyoming. Her father is a strict patriach, Hiram (Christopher Kriesa), who treats his wife and daughters as servants. And it’s implied that he is pimping out the women as well. But this comes so far later in the movie that it feels like an entirely different movie.
Also, it was done a lot better on the fifth season of Fargo, which might explain why the movie took two years to find distribution. Sweeney plays a huge role in the marketing but this is more of Halsey’s story if anything else. I was unaware of her but am surprised to hear she’s been around for well over a decade performing as a singer. I feel Tost had intended Mandy to be the main protagonist as most of the actions revolve around her in some way. I feel an entirely different movie about her would’ve made a better feature.
Sweeney really doesn’t have much to do for the second half of the movie. But she still is worth watching when she’s on screen. I think if people could let their unfair biases down about her, they would appreciate her acting.
And both Hauser and McClarnon seem to have become the type of actors who are always joys to watch even if they’re not the main characters. It is nice to see a fairer representation of people and both Hauser with his bigger size and McClarnon with his Lakota heritage deserve all the fame and attention they’ve received.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 