There are three new American movies making themselves felt this week, and none of them are interested in the America of billboards, campaign slogans, or the wide clean road vanishing toward a heroic sunset. They are about people hemmed in by weather, work, family, shame, memory, and the terrible inconvenience of needing someone else.
One is set in Missouri, one in the Colorado mountains, and one in Depression-era Oregon. Each discovers that a landscape is not merely scenery. It is a fact of life, like a stubborn father, a missed paycheck, a secret you cannot speak aloud, or a winter that has no intention of ending.
The most surprising of the three may be Robert Greene’s *Too Much Sugar*, which premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section on September 3. Greene, whose previous films have blurred the line between documentary and performance with rare sensitivity, has gone to Moberly, Missouri, a town of fewer than 14,000 people. He did not go there to explain it to us. That distinction is everything.
He met Ryan “Holli-wood” Holliger at a middle-school basketball game, where Holliger was calling out plays from the bleachers with the conviction of a man who had long ago decided that silence was overrated. Holliger is a carpenter, a fighter, a father, and, as the film gradually reveals, a man whose large family has been asked to accommodate both his charisma and his complications. Greene later returned to help Holliger make a movie. That simple proposition opens a door that documentary filmmakers do not always have the nerve to walk through.
Holliger and his friend Michael Midgyett, a rapper and laborer carrying grief that has altered the shape of his life, are not positioned merely as subjects under observation. Greene gives them cameras, stories, room to invent, and the right to make themselves larger, smaller, sillier, sadder, and more heroic than the ordinary facts might permit.
Midgyett makes a fantasy about undoing a personal tragedy. Holliger makes a brash buddy comedy. Their families begin to imagine stories of their own. What begins as a film that might have been about fatherhood becomes something more unruly and more humane: a movie about who gets the privilege of turning experience into narrative.
That is an unusually generous thing for a filmmaker to offer. The people of a small Missouri town have often appeared in American movies as evidence. They are evidence of economic decline, regional grievance, family values, addiction, resilience, backwardness, decency, danger, or whatever thesis the visitor arrived with in the trunk of his rental car. *Too Much Sugar* appears to reject that whole arrangement. It is interested in the strange, tender fact that people who are accustomed to being described may have a few descriptions of their own to contribute.
Moberly is not treated as a postcard or a sociological specimen. It is a place of boxing gyms, construction work, crowded households, old wounds, local reputations, artistic ambitions, and friendships that survive because they have learned how to absorb a certain amount of damage. The details matter because they are the actual material of a life. A man’s work, his children, his sense of humor, his debts to the past, his private dreams of being seen properly. These are not local color. They are the plot.
There is music in that, too, although it does not arrive wearing denim and carrying an acoustic guitar. Midgyett’s musical language is rap. The film’s score is credited to Wilkie Davis-Greene and Ramin Kousha. It is a useful reminder that regional identity is not preserved in amber. The person listening to hip-hop in Missouri is not somehow living outside the American story. He may be living at its center.
The Venice Film Festival lists *Too Much Sugar* as a 98-minute American production directed and edited by Greene, with Holliger, Midgyett, and several members of their extended circle in the cast. That roster itself suggests a movie built not around stars but around a community slowly deciding what it wants to confess, perform, and reclaim. The University of Missouri describes the project as following two Moberly friends trying to make a film about fatherhood, a description that sounds neat enough until one considers how little about fathers, sons, and unfinished lives is ever neat.[1][2]
A Western Without Gunfire
Andrew Haigh’s *A Long Winter* begins with one of the oldest situations in the history of storytelling: a family isolated in a hostile place, waiting for something terrible to happen.
The film premiered at Telluride on September 4. Haigh has adapted a story by Colm Tóibín, moving it from its original European setting to Colorado in 1951. It is a shift that tells us something about the American West. You can bring a tale of loneliness, repression, longing, and family disappointment to the Rockies, and the mountains will translate it into a kind of myth.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Caitríona Balfe play Lester and Louise, who live with their sons on an isolated mountain farm. Fred Hechinger and Kit Connor play the sons. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays Jimmy, a young man toward whom Mike, one of the sons, finds himself drawn. When Tommy leaves for Korea, tensions in the household sharpen. Louise, troubled by the narrowness of her life and the accumulation of disappointments that no one has named clearly enough, walks into a blinding snowstorm toward her brother’s home and disappears.
The setup has the bones of a Western. There is an unforgiving landscape. There are men who must work with their hands and speak with great economy. There is an absent son headed toward war. There is a family burdened by the idea that love is something you prove through endurance rather than conversation.
But Haigh is not interested in the familiar machinery of the genre. Nobody needs to pull a gun. The mountain has already done the work of the villain. The snow is not symbolic because it is white and cold and cinematic. It is symbolic because it makes every human decision feel final. It turns a walk into a disappearance. It turns a family argument into a survival story.
The director has said that *A Long Winter* is his version of *The Revenant*, which is an intriguing phrase because Haigh’s most enduring subject has always been the distance between what people feel and what they can bear to say. His wilderness is not only outside the farmhouse. It exists inside a young man who cannot safely explain whom he loves, inside a husband who lacks the vocabulary for his wife’s unhappiness, and inside a mother who seems to have reached the edge of what she can endure.[3]
The picture was filmed in Alberta, with the Canadian Rockies standing in for Colorado. That is the kind of movie magic that can sound disappointing until one remembers that the West of the movies has always been part geography and part state of mind. What matters is not a county line. What matters is the sensation of a human being standing in a vast, indifferent space and realizing that no one may be coming to help.
Telluride is, after all, in Colorado, and it is fitting that Haigh brought his film there first. Early reports describe the film as a transposition of Tóibín’s story into 1951 Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, where the landscape becomes more than a backdrop to family sorrow. It becomes the force that drives the story toward its reckoning. The film is also expected to play Toronto and New York before a later MUBI release.[3][4]
The Price of Freedom
Then there is *The Weight*, Padraic McKinley’s first feature, which arrived at the Deauville American Film Festival with Ethan Hawke receiving the festival’s Talent Award.
The title has the solemn inevitability of a Depression picture. You can almost hear the chains before you know whose wrists they are on.
Set in Oregon in 1933, the film stars Hawke as Samuel Murphy, a widower separated from his daughter and sent to a brutal labor camp. Russell Crowe plays Warden Clancy, who offers Murphy a bargain familiar to anyone who has ever read a hard-luck American novel: take part in a dangerous gold-smuggling mission through the wilderness, and you might earn your freedom.
The offer sounds like freedom only until one notices who is making it.
That is the central truth of the Depression story. The poor are often offered choices that are not choices at all. Go hungry or leave home. Take the dangerous job or lose the family. Carry the load or become part of the landscape yourself. In *The Weight*, the wilderness is both a physical ordeal and a kind of prison wall without visible bars. The men have gold to move, miles to cover, weather to outlast, and a corrupt authority figure waiting to decide what their lives are worth.
Hawke has spent much of his career playing intelligent men caught between ideals and obligations. That quality should serve him well here. Samuel Murphy does not sound like a mythic hero. He sounds like a father whose circumstances have been reduced to one desperate objective: get back to his child. That is generally enough to make a man brave, foolish, compromised, and dangerous all at once.
The Deauville festival describes the film as the story of a widower sent to a labor camp after his wife’s death, then offered the chance to return to his daughter through a deadly gold-smuggling mission. Julia Jones and Austin Amelio also star alongside Hawke and Crowe. Reports from the festival identify it as a 115-minute historical survival thriller set in Oregon, with Hawke’s character caught between hostile wilderness, betrayal, and the faint possibility of going home.[5][6]
It opens in U.S. theaters September 18.[7]
The Country Beneath the Myth
What connects these three pictures is not a shared plot. It is a shared suspicion of easy legend.
*Too Much Sugar* looks at working people in Missouri and asks what might happen if they are permitted to create their own mythology rather than serve as supporting evidence in somebody else’s. *A Long Winter* takes the Western landscape and discovers that the deepest violence may be a family’s inability to say what it needs. *The Weight* returns to Depression-era Oregon, where a man learns that freedom can be offered with the same cold calculation as a business transaction.
There is a version of America that movies have sold for generations. It has beautiful emptiness, tough men, brave women, hard work, open space, moral clarity, and a sunset that seems to reward whoever survives until the final reel.
These films seem to know better. They understand that the empty field may be lonely, the mountain may be deadly, the work may not pay enough, the family may hurt you, and the person in the next room may have a story you have never thought to ask them to tell.
That is why they feel alive. They do not seek to make the country look grander than it is. They are more interested in making it audible.