East of Wall
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Stars: Porshia Zimiga, Tabatha Zimiga, Scoot McNairy, Jennifer Ehle
Writer/Director: Kate Beecroft
Anyone who’s driven the rolling stretch of Interstate 90 from Minnesota to Wall, South Dakota will attest to the dominant roadside feature of the last 300 miles or so: billboard after billboard advertising Wall Drug Store, the terrifically tacky tourist attraction that has been enticing motorists — and handing out free cups of ice water — for nearly a century.
Those iconic signs pop up more than once in the course of the South Dakota-set drama East of Wall. But it’s easy to miss them in the blazing light of this sprawling, yet miraculously intimate, story of women working the range.
First-time feature director Kate Beecroft spent three years living and working with horse rancher Tabatha Zimiga on her 3,000-acre spread before shooting a single frame of this lightly fictionalized account of Tabatha’s life, in which Zimiga, her family, and their friends all play themselves. The setup is schematic: As happened in real life, Tabatha, her otherwise long blonde hair half-shaved off in what she calls her “warrior” cut, is portrayed as struggling to keep her ranch up and running following the sudden death of her husband, John. Besides her four children — and despite her own nagging financial troubles — Tabatha has taken in a houseful of additional teens who’ve been abandoned or orphaned (East of Wall doesn’t spell it out, but it’s clear fentanyl is the major culprit in most, if not all, of those cases).
Otherwise, the narrative arc of East of Wall is as loose-limbed as a newborn foal. Beecroft immerses us in the day-to-day ritual of horse ranching: Tabatha trains both her horses and her young humans in the muddy confines of a corral; her daughter Porshia — when she’s not setting the prairie ablaze with the speed of her galloping horsemanship — helps present the ranch horses for sale, either in person at auctions or on shaky TikTok videos. From the start, it’s clear the ranch is in dire financial straits, but still the group soldiers on training, showing, and selling for prices Tabatha well knows are below market value.
Off-hours, Tabatha heads to the bar to commiserate with fellow ranchers while the kids cavort on their horses in the same offhanded manner suburban kids cruise around town in their parents’ cars. They ride them, bathe them, stand on them — and even casually lie on their backs, lazily scrolling through their phone apps as if they were lounging on beach chairs.
Into this thrum of life enters Roy, a horse dealer from Texas, played with good-old-boy charm by Scoot McNairy, last seen as Woody Guthrie in the Bob Dylan biography A Complete Unknown (and one of just two professional actors in the movie — the other being Tony-winning Jennifer Ehle as Tabatha’s hard-drinking, sharp-tongued mother). Roy has big plans for Tabatha & Co. — plans that could bring financial salvation, but at what cost to the family’s cherished traditions?
That Big City Interloper plot device — the only wholly fictional element in the film — offers an interesting diversion, but really what we’re here for is the movie’s deep dive into what director Beecroft calls “The New West.” I’ve written dozens of times that the best movies take you to places you’ve never been to meet people you’ve never encountered. In this case, that’s true only if you’ve never hung out with horse ranchers in South Dakota — and let’s face it, virtually none of us have.
Until now. So intimate is Beecroft’s style we can feel the stirred-up mud caked onto our faces; smell the leather of the sweaty harnesses; inhale the cigarette smoke in Tabatha’s cluttered double-wide trailer. The teen girls, sleeping in the same bed, cluster like kittens. And when Porshia takes off across the prairie at full gallop, her head barely bobbing as the half-ton of horse beneath her gallops madly through the grass, the dry South Dakota wind whistles past our ears with glorious immediacy.
But Beecroft saves the most absorbing moment for last, as Tabatha and a group of her fellow female ranchers gather around a campfire to share their life stories. As if reciting a melancholy liturgy, the women tell their tales of death and discovery, of bad men and worse decisions.
Then comes Tabatha’s turn, and at this point Beecroft just lets the camera roll as her story flows; a ripple of regret followed by a stream of sadness chased by a torrent of terror. I’ll not offer a single glimpse into the details unleashed in these three minutes of film; that would be an injustice to both the story and the storyteller. But I will say this: If there is any justice in the universe of cinematic legacies, Tabatha’s monologue in East of Wall will endure right up there with Quint’s in Jaws and Colonel Kurtz’s in Apocalypse Now.
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