There’s not much new that the movies can say about the open political sore that is immigration policy and realities along America’s southern borders.
The preponderance of movies on the subject have historically been pro-immigration, not a stretch for a nation founded by immigrants.
It’s hard for some people to accept that merely wanting to move here is not an instant qualification for being allowed in. And it’s impossible for many to understand that desperate human beings have always fled violence and poverty, just to survive, much less have the “better life” that living here once promised.
But if there’s a better scripted line about impersonal dogma turning personally compassionate than one in the new drama “Broken Land,” I haven’t heard it.
“She wasn’t anybody,” an embittered old rancher played by the great character actor David Morse intones. “But then she became somebody.”
The whole equation changes for empathetic people when they humanize the “problem,” or have it humanized for them when they actually meet the human beings propaganda has demonized for them.
Rancher Carson Tidwell is talking, in that memorable line, about the young stranger who broke into his shed, a young woman he shot at in the dark and wounded. Finding her hurt, reluctantly helping her and even more reluctantly not turning her in to “la Migra” — Border Patrol immigration enforcement — is the journey his character takes in this lean indie drama set outside of Laredo, Texas.
Tidwell is recently widowed, stuck out in the sagebrush with a few cattle, a house going to pot and a small ranch he struggles — in his 70s — to tend.
He’s never stopped using the word “wetbacks” when describing the immigrants who make their way from Central and South America to this long, dusty and dry border. He never learned Spanish. He can’t even be bothered to be civil to Border Patrol agents with too many vowels in their last names.
And then there’s his estranged son (Bill Heck), an agent half-looking out for the old man, half-hating him. He has his reasons.
Breaking into his old Cadillac out in the shed isn’t softening Tidwell. The warning shot he fires comes right after the cussing and after the shots that weren’t fired into the air. He finds out what he hit later the next day.
Irena (Jakylan Bejarano) took one in the leg. She is bleeding and in great pain, yet reluctant to become this callous old man’s prisoner.
We figure out hos tough she is just from her look. She shaved her head to pass for a male for her trek from El Salvador. She speaks very little English, and Tidwell speaks less Spanish than you’d expect of someone who grew up in America’s Spanglish Belt.
Her “coyote,” smuggler? “He go.” She was heading to Colorado. “YOU take,” she begs.
“No take,” he growls. “No help.”
But having this young woman under his roof connects to his sense of responsibility, the same thing that gets him up in the morning to feed and count his few cattle on parched land, to wrestle with the valves of his rusted-up water tank.
Director and co-writer Joseph T. Walker gives his feature directing debut a desolate setting and deliberate pace that suits the story arc that Tidwell travels — from myopic intolerance to understanding and even compassion.
There’s not much that surprises this sparse, well-worn narrative, although the “secret” hurt and guilt that the rancher carries is a bit of a jolt.
This picture was always going to succeed or fail based on the performances, and Morse is as sure a bet as the movies have for an actor who adds value — and then some — to every film he graces.
He lets us feel the values Tidwell has lived by and makes us ponder == along with the old man in the almost-as-old Ford pickup — how those values might be too confining and myopic to cling to.
Heck makes son Harley properly brittle and testy about a father who drinks and drives and breaks a ticket book of other laws, but whom he and his comrades let slide in the time-honored corruption of “officer’s discretion.”
Veteran bit player Theo Gutierrez (“The Long Game”) makes an outsized impact on the film’s grounded sense of reality as a Mexican American welder and handyman that the not-that-tolerant-of-Latinos Tidwell leans on.
And screen newcomer Bejarano ably conveys desperation bordering on manipulation, and the doggedness required to undertake such a journey.
One smart choice the film makes is leaving her Spanish attempts to communicate with this captor/rancher untranslated. The language barrier is just one gulf between these two. Or so they think.
One over-the-top overreaction is more grating and a harder sell than some of the others. And the “secret” is a bit of a reach that makes murky the changing motivations of our anti-hero.
But predictability and overreaches aside, “Broken Land” ia a solid, sober-minded and somber exploration of “the Border” problem, one that like Eastwood’s “The Mule,” isn’t destined to change any minds — but which might slow down a knee-jerk reaction or two.
Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity
Cast: David Morse, Jaklyn Bejarano, Theo Gutierrez and Bill Heck.
Credits: Directed by Joseph T. Walker, scripted by Joseph T. Walker and Christopher C. Young. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:40
Movie Nation 