War Pony: Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, by David Bax
War Pony, the directorial debut of Gina Gammell and Riley Keough, takes place on a Lakota reservation and tells parallel stories of two young males who engage in a series of extralegal behaviors (stealing, scamming, selling drugs) to get from each day to the next. These boys live lives of advanced poverty and, as we have seen in both fiction and reality, poverty breeds crime.
So thank goodness War Pony is not just another poe-faced testimonial of hardscrabble life designed to allow faux-concerned middlebrow types to feel good about themselves for tsk-tsking to their friends in the theater. To be sure, there is nothing bowdlerized or sugarcoated about the lives of young father Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) and twelve year old Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder). But Gammell and Keough have far too much love and respect for their characters to parade their misery across the screen for us to see.
Where War Pony really falls, categorically, is under the descriptor of “slice of life.” Connotatively, that term has come to be associated with a kind of pleasantness. But Gammell and Keough are making a slice-of-life film more in the tradition of Larry Clark‘s Kids or, more recently, Jonah Hill‘s mid90s, portraits of a hardscrabble life nigh-unimaginable to its likely audience but nonetheless filled with the joy and verve of being young and alive. For what it’s worth, War Pony is better than both of those movies.
One difference is that, while those movies take place in New York City and Los Angeles, respectively, War Pony is set in the remoteness of America’s northern plains. As a result, these characters seem to live cheek by jowl with all sorts of wildlife. I don’t just mean the stray dogs that dot the streets (or the one expensive, bred dog that stands out by comparison and becomes a major storyline). There are also buffalo, turkeys, spiders and more. Gammell and Keough linger on all of them.
Conversely, one element that is notable for its absence rather than its abundance is the Covid-19 pandemic. Making assumptions about when the film was shot–it premiered at Cannes in May of last year–it’s either a deliberate choice to excise any sign of the pandemic or simply an authentic documentation of life in the rural land within our country during that time.
Being a city mouse/liberal bubble inhabitant/coastal elite, I can’t say for sure. But I am certain that there is very little in War Pony about which Gammell and Keough were not intentional or deliberate. The film took reportedly took years to develop; the time and care show in its deep passion and honesty. This isn’t some distanced overview of a culture. This all feels fully lived and lived-in, as evidenced by some of the more bizarre particulars, from the funny (a character wearing a Kansas City Chiefs cap) to the darkly absurd (a Halloween party at a rich white family’s mansion). Like its subjects, War Pony is one of a kind.
