THE THICKET - Mark Reviews Movies

The Thicket, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2024

Plot-wise, The Thicket is fairly standard Western fare. A gang of outlaws terrorize small towns and travelers on the countryside, and it's up to a team of bounty hunters—motivated by personal reasons or money—to put a stop to the roving criminals. Those are just the broad strokes of director Elliott Lester's film, which is far more compelling in its little details of character, the setting, and the elegiac tone that permeates this traditional story.

The backdrop here is striking for at least a couple of reasons. For one thing, the story, adapted from Joe R. Lansdale's novel by screenwriter Chris Kelley, is set during the winter, meaning that meaning scenes here possess a starkly bleak look. Wide shots of the plains are drained of all color, because snow covers the grass and any other plants that might otherwise be there. The vastness of the terrain somehow feels vaster still, as well as devoid of life and any kind of warmth. This is a lonely time and place, which makes for an appropriate background for this cast of loners, pariahs, and people who have lost everything.

The times are changing, too, as made clear by opening shots juxtaposing a girl searching the snow for just a single flowery growth with someone racing down a road on a motorcycle. The contrast of those images is jarring, because the girl looks to come from one era, while the bike rider seems to come from some futuristic other, especially with the riding suit and stylish goggles the motorcyclist dons.

The future is here, or at least, it's on its way in the story's setting, as a couple of our bounty hunters, traveling gravediggers by trade, go from town to town on a motorized hearse and a couple of other automobiles appear here or there in streets of this or that town. Whatever the frontier was, as both an idea and an ideal, is fading, and sooner rather than later, all of these people, these places, and this way of life will fade into myth or obscurity.

Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage), the lead gravedigger, is already connected to some part of the legend of the West, since he has a scoped rifle that once belonged to Annie Oakley. Reginald, though, might not be made for the history books or the dime novels of Western tales, although his shooting skills might qualify him for such a position. Instead, he's just a sad and aimless wanderer, always passing through and primarily noted, as well as regularly mocked, for having dwarfism—unless someone gets on his wrong side, when Reginald will make it clear that he's not to be underestimated.

Almost every character of note here has some old or fresh pain driving them, but as some of these characters make apparent, an old wound of the heart can feel fresh decades later. That's far more intriguing than the surface level of the plot, which amounts to a rescue mission. The person in need of rescuing is Lula (Esmé Creed-Miles), the girl from the opening scene looking for a flower, and leading the search is her older brother Jack (Levon Hawke).

The two become orphans shortly into the story, when Lula returns to find that her father followed her mother in succumbing to smallpox. On the road to their aunt's home, the siblings' grandfather is killed by an outlaw, and Jack is knocked unconscious, leaving Lula to be taken by the gang.

The leader of that pack of criminals is Cut Throat Bill, who, despite the name, is a woman played by Juliette Lewis. At first, Bill is a nothing more than an ordinary villain—a thief and a cold-blooded killer. As we spend more time with her and she prepares Lula for whatever it is she has in store for the girl, though, Bill reveals more than an inclination toward violence. It all has to do with her own past, especially the scar that covers almost the whole side of her face, and how, in some ways, she's as lonely and vulnerable as Lula feels in captivity.

The plot, of course, has Jack enlisting the aid of Reginald and his grave-digging partner Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe), who, in turn, are being hunted by a pair of brothers (played by James Hetfield—yes, the heavy metal singer—and consummate character actor Macon Blair) for an incident at the pair's most recent stop. Others, including an essentially captive prostitute named Sue (Leslie Grace) whom Jack wants to help, join the posse along the road, while Bill robs and kills more and more people.

Lester is in no hurry to arrive at standoffs and showdowns, though, because he knows the real heart of this tale is in the broken nature of its characters, who are plainly or secretly desperate for some kind of hope (When Jack offers Reginald land he can finally call his first real home, the look on Dinklage's face, as the stern grimace briefly lifts, says it all). In other words, the stakes here aren't simply the girl's fate and stopping Bill, whose entire existence of living through and acting out trauma is summarized by a haunting single word near the end.

The Thicket sees these characters for who they are—sympathizing with or at least understanding them beyond the archetypes they represent. That goes a long way here, as do the look and feel of this film, which comes across as a eulogy for the outcasts and forgotten of a fading period of legend.

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