REVIEW:
Americana is one of a slew of new movies released in late August, (others include Caught Stealing and Highest to Lowest,) that are all about the quirky crime genre. These are basically the type of movies that got started with Pulp Fiction, and then the onslaught of movies that followed in its footsteps (everything from Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead to Two Days in the Valley.) It’s about funny characters crossing paths with an ultra-violent and unexpected set of circumstances.
The characters in these movies tend to all be after the same McMuffin. Which means some random object that everyone wants. In Pulp Fiction, it was a briefcase filled with something that was purposefully left unknown. Tarantino was making the point that it doesn’t really matter what’s in the briefcase, by never telling us. Here, in Americana, the McMuffin is a ghost shirt, which is an ancient Indian relic, worth a hell of a lot of money.
The story is about two main sets of characters. There’s Mandy, the woman who has an unusual son, and whose boyfriend has been hired to steal the shirt. And then there’s the couple who happens to be at the right place at the right time, to overhear all about this caper that will be taking place. The couple is composed of Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser) and Penny (Sydney Sweeney.) She’s a waitress at a local diner, and he’s a down and out loser of a guy who goes on a couple of dates with a woman and then proposes to her. Apparently he’s done this a number of times already just this year.
Lefty and Penny aren’t dating, but they become instant friends when they team up to rob the robbers in this movie. And the idea of a potential future romance between them is certainly teased. The fact that these two amateurs plan to steal from people who are involved in criminal activity and murder shows just how stupid they really are. The movie thinks these two are the most interesting characters on screen here, and granted they are indeed played by the best and most known actors in the film, but they are certainly not the most compelling.
Far more interesting than their story is the story of Mandy (played by Halsey,) that woman with the son. Her son thinks he is a great Native American Chief reincarnated. As far as humor goes, this kid is the highlight of the movie. Especially when he meets an actual Native American tribe and doesn’t drop the act, even when they have no interest in what he’s preaching.
The movie does a clever thing in its first half, showing us a lengthy opening scene, then continuing on, only tell later reveal that the opening scene we witnessed came later on in the story of the film. That’s a Pulp Fiction move right there, with that movie opening with a diner robbery that we would return to for the ending. Here, we open with a man being beaten and then killed, shot by an arrow by the boy. And then we see him shortly after, alive and well, in the diner hearing about the job. This is also similar to what Pulp Fiction did with the Travolta character, Vincent Vega, showing him die in one scene while walking into the kitchen of Butch’s house, only to see him alive and well in a car in the next scene. It was then that we realized we had just watched the end of his story, and were now going back to the middle.
In Americana, they might use the same technique as Pulp Fiction, of fracturing the narrative and telling it all out of order, but they do it in a different way, so that instead of the opening scene coming back for the ending (and then not actually being the ending to the story, even though it is the last thing we see,) we are actually all caught up and brought up to speed somewhere in the middle of this film, when the caper has been committed, the ghost shirt has been stolen, some of the parties involved have betrayed each other, and the boyfriend is back with Mandy, only to be shot with an arrow by her son.
It’s nice to not have to wait until the ending to get all caught up in the narrative, and return to how the movie began. And that leads us to the most interesting and unexpected story of all. The story of Mandy’s father. I won’t say much, since the trailers leave all of this out, but let’s just say it’s a whole other story that we never see coming. Ans there’s one particular part, involving a door, that is both the scariest and creepiest, as well as most interesting and powerful moment of the entire movie. Especially the way they build suspense by not revealing for the longest time what is behind it.
Somewhere in the second half of this one a whole bunch of armed groups and teams get established and brought into the picture. There’s the Native American group, the man who has hired others to steal the ghost shirt, Lefty and Penny, and Mandy and her father’s goons. It seems to be headed towards an end of True Romance kind of situation, with a massive shootout, involving lots of different parties showing up to the same place at the same time. Only we don’t really get that. There’s a lot of build up, but the execution doesn’t quite land the plane.
What might have worked better would have been if the buyer did show up with a while bunch of guys, and is Mandy and her sisters got involved in a shootout with the men of her father, while inside the house, all while other forces were surrounding the house on the outside. So if Many, for example, was fighting the men inside the house, and then stepping out to fight the Native Americans as well as the men who worked for the buyer. But we never quite get there. Instead, the ending is kind of a let down.
With regards to Paul Walter Hauser and Sydney Sweeney, the selling points of this movie, neither one of them is nearly at their best. For Sweeney, she looks completely different. This movie was made two years earlier than it was released, and like her character in Madame Webb, here she is almost unrecognizable. For Hauser, it’s just not his best role. There’s a little too much attention on him, and the attempts to make him likable because of his dopiness don’t quite pay off the way they did for him in Richard Jewell. Luckily this movie gets enough out of its other performers, including Halsey, that having Sweeney and Hauser not be all that great, turns out to still be okay. It’s a fine movie with some pretty good ideas that just could have been handled a little better.