AMERICANA Review: No Country for Old Memes

A boy named Cal obsesses over the Native American culture to the point that he starts believing that he is a reincarnation of Sitting Bill.

Unbeknown to him, his mother, Mandy (Halsey), and his asshole father, Dillon (Eric Dane), come into possession of a valuable Native American artefact – a ghost shirt, which Mandy ends up running away with. Meanwhile, another pair of characters manage to get tangled in the same mess: Penny Jo Poplin (Sydney Sweeney), a waitress with the singing career aspirations, accidentally learns some vague details about stealing the artefact, and recruits her new friend, Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), to try and profit from it, too.

And then, there is Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon) – the leader of a Native American gang who have their own interest in the ghost shirt and aren’t afraid to rush anywhere, guns blazing, to obtain it.

From the variety of the main players in Tony Tost’s Americana, the one the film itself resembles the most is Cal – in that it, too, strives to be something else, seemingly, with no core understanding of what it really is. Like Cal’s knowledge of the Native American culture that’s based on many hours of watching classic Westerns, Americana is rooted in the authors’ clear and genuine love for cinema.

Inspiration in the form of the Coen brothers’ cinematic universe, as well as any number or revisionist Western films and shows, and Quentin Tarantino’s movies is particularly evident. Which is not the worst trait per se in the post-postmodernist world, where almost everything we encounter as an audience is somehow a reflection of some other piece of art. The issue that plagues Tost’s film, though, is that it’s not just the style that’s floundering in search of identity – it’s the movie’s essence as well.

In Pulp Fiction, a character dies in the middle of the film only to merrily walk off into the sunset with his gun tucked into his shorts in the finale, thanks to the film’s non-linear structure, which creates a sort of a cinematic magic, a sense that anything is possible. Americana uses a similar narrative trick, shuffling the story’s chronology and “resurrecting” a character who dies at the beginning to take part in the rest of the film – but with no particular emotional effect embedded in the move.

The character in question is one of the most unlikable amongst an already not very pleasing bunch. The core group of characters here is seemingly meant to come off as endearing with their multiple quirks. Instead, they unfortunately come off as the sets of traits, reminiscent of the Coens' films, five seasons of Fargo, and even the Poker Face series, which Tost took over as the showrunner in its second season.

This doesn’t give a lot of rope to a great cast, who struggle to breath life into the ghosts of culture past; this is particularly true in case of Paul Walter Hauser, who is stuck with once again appearing as an eccentric and largely delusional man he already sort of played before. Moreover, the catalogue of people here doesn’t help the film’s meaning to take root. The Coenesque world is always filled with tragic fools and people irreversibly corrupted by evil, but it also contains at least one person who tries to hold on to a semblance of logic, truth, and the evasive sense of reality.

There isn’t really one in the world of Americana, underneath the blue never-ending sky, in the midst of the vast, melancholic landscape, which Tosk and cinematographer Nigel Bluck (True Detective) turn into a crucial character of its own. This is a world with not much hope and fairness in it, which doesn’t really rhyme well with the movie’s tone and style.

At the same time, Americana does manage to hold its own in the face of at least half of the Coens duet, as Ethan Coen’s Honey Don't! is being released at the same time, and that particular blood-soaked simulacrum is much more devoid of the spark of life than any given scene in Tost's film. 

The film is now playing in select theaters, via Lionsgate. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.