“God’s Country” (2022) stars Thandiwe Newton as a college professor, Sandra Gundry, who discovers two men trespassing on her property in this neo-Western set in a winter barren Montana. She lives in a canyon far away from everyone, and her closest neighbor, Arthur (Kai Lennox), also works at the college. As she tries to handle the situation, she learns more about her community and must grapple with an existential crisis that she thought that she left behind.
“God’s Country” is divided into seven chapters, days. The movie zigs when you think that it is going to zag. It begins with a death, and it takes a while before we discover the deceased person’s identity. We know that Sandra is a teacher, but what does she teach? We find a box with unused tools in a crawl space next to her bed, but who did they belong to? I love that I got the answers wrong every time. It is a brilliant movie that explores subjects of race and socioeconomic privilege without becoming an Afterschool Special. Julian Higgins comes at the subjects from unexpected angles so it is impossible to feel as if these are well trod subjects. It feels fresh and new even though these issues are as old as the country. On one level, the film is a ghost story and begins in an empty classroom with a slideshow operating on its own showing images of the past. The people who occupy these spaces may be new, but they are compelled to act in stories that started generations before.
The viewers and other characters assumptions about Sandra because of how she looks, a slight, gentle-voiced woman, are a complete misreading of her. While the overall story trajectory is predictable, the road to it is surprising, human and tragic. Congratulations to the fifty-year old thespian who had to wait decades to get a starring role worthy of her talents, not just her looks, and gets to use her real name in the credits. Newton carries the entire movie, and there are entire swaths without any dialogue. The best actors act with their hands. They just do not hang there. In one scene, her hands tremble, but it is not until the end of the movie that we learn which emotion is stirring within her. When she confronts two larger men with weapons, she stands her ground with a firmness in opposition to the precariousness of her circumstances. She delivers such a powerful character study about a woman who rejects cynicism and is compelled to change the things that she cannot accept. Unfortunately that list grows as she has more time to notice her outside world.
Despite going into “God’s Country” expecting a neo-Western, I was still surprised at how it ticked the boxes of the genre. Neo-Westerns are set in contemporary settings, which includes the academic setting, and traditional settings such as the vast landscape. Neo-Westerns meditate on how the Old West mentality translates into the “civilized” world and how justice is administered. Sandra wants a system in place that lives by its explicit rules, equal footing. “We all gotta play by the same rules if this is gonna work.” As the film unfolds, it becomes obvious that people have one set of rules but live by another whether because of practicality (there are few law enforcement officers) or privilege (property rights are theoretical and the idea of minorities even being recommended as tenure is seen as losing ground). Sandra is searching for justice and is put in the contradictory, uncomfortable roles of moral authority, the potential victim, and the protector. Instead of government administering theoretically objective rules, she becomes the stranger, the outsider, forced to confront the town’s bad element and administer her (subjective) idea of justice. It is a role that she wants to reject. She wants people in authority such as her neighbor/colleague and the deputy, to play their part, but they are either incapable of doing it or are corrupt. The objective rules do not work because the process depends on weak men to implement it, but what about women? How does the strange woman from out of town face the bad guys, who are not just bad guys?
There are some great textured and nuanced scenes in “God’s Country” that show that Sandra has privilege and at least one of the trespassers, Nathan (Joris Jarsky) is not as bad as he appears. One scene takes place in a church, and Nathan is prepared to square off until Sandra’s response strips him of any desire to play his expected role. It is one of those graceful moments that Sandra creates a sacred secular space of possibility and hope, a new script for characters to play in that space, but the moment passes and everyone has to resume their antagonistic roles. We keep getting glimpses of how Sandra’s world looks. When she jogs with her dog, she sees a deer and her doe. Sandra’s relationship with animals, peaceful coexistence with the wild ones, and freedom with restraint on its predator nature for the domesticated one, shows a vision of a fragile new Eden. Her classroom is also another ideal space within a larger territory ceded to predators. Gretchen (Tanaya Beatty), a Native American student, loves this space and tries to retreat there, but when Sandra tries to use objective rules to expand that Eden to the rest of school, she realizes that she has just made Gretchen’s existence in the broader world more difficult.
The broader world rejects the objective rules, the decency veneer of civilization and Sandra’s secular sacred spaces. Sandra’s crisis is how to deal with a world that rejects paradise and her powerlessness to protect those that she cared about. Here is where the denouement of the film gets interesting. Women are symbols of civilizing forces, but this rejection only leaves Sandra in charge of the basics of humanity such as burial rites for the dead. At the beginning of “God’s Country,” Sandra does not wait for the ground to thaw to bury remains, nor does she scatter ashes. Only that role remains intact throughout the entire film, the burial of innocents. What other role remains for Sandra in a neo-Western?
Arthur, her neighbor and colleague, is the next most interesting character in the film. The trajectory of his character is disappointingly predictable as someone who can navigate the academic world and the vast Western expanse. Lennox does a great job of showing a character with power who is internally at sea and aware of his vulnerability and weakness. He is a man without rest. In one explosive scene between the trespassers and Sandra, Sandra’s innate strength inadvertently exposes him to a verbal attach from the younger trespasser, Samuel (Jefferson White), who attacks anything that he perceives as prey. While no one would want to associate with Arthur, he probably has more in common with most viewers-upholding a status quo because his privilege affords him protection that he is incapable of providing for himself.
While I loved “God’s Country,” I wanted to know what happened to Arthur. This film may be the best movie of the year, at least in the US.
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Because “God’s Country” operates in a post-fall world with no God, the title feels like sarcasm. The literal meaning is a place that God favors, but could be civilization such as a city away from the frontier or the opposite. Either way, Sandra occupies all those spaces. It is also important not to forget that this is a Christmas movie when people are supposed to be at their best. It is a time when at the Christmas party and church, people of different socioeconomic status and races can find common ground to interact, but it does not work. At church, the détente is limited, and at the party, all the minorities are more comfortable with each other, and the deputy ends up hanging with Sandra because in that space, though she is literally a professor, because of her race, she has more in common with him.
While it may not have been the filmmaker or original author’s intention, I found myself thinking of the Black spiritual, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.” Sandra loses her faith in God over Hurricane Katrina, water, and now she loses her faith in civilization over fire, the torching of her home and guns. I also saw Sandra as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, especially in her role as someone who helps people transition to death. When someone dies, their breath or soul leaves their body, and with her home burned down, it reminded me of the spirit leaving the temple except she is evicted. Every time Sandra had to go into areas that were not hers to find some way to resolve the situation, she usually had a comforting effect, but there was also the potential for danger being in the presence of the Lord. I obviously do not think that Sandra is literally God, but as the sole instrument of justice, she plays a godlike role, an intermediary between the realms.
In a more obscure way, “God’s Country” felt like a fight between dominionism, rule over nature, and stewardship, responsibility to care for the world. The men are symbols of dominionism and Sandra is a symbol of stewardship, but when the latter is rejected, he who lives by the gun, dies by the gun. In a world in which dominion dominates, there is no guarantee who will dominate. Technically Sandra is now abiding by the rules of that society.
I am interested in Arthur’s fate because he may be the most dangerous person in “God’s Country” though the weakest because he is a threat in both civilization, academia, and the country. From the beginning of the film, he lied to his neighbor about seeing the red truck or knowing. Unlike the brothers, he can get away with everything because of class. Only Sandra knows the extent of his misdeeds. Regardless of how a viewer feels about violence or Sandra’s decision, Sandra believes that Nathan is just as culpable as his brother though she knows that he tries to restrain him. By that same logic, she should kill Arthur. I think that if anyone feels qualms about the ending, it reminded me of “There Will Be Blood” (2007) specifically the line, “I drink your milkshake” when she drinks their beer. It is such a male drag thing to do. Newton is such a gorgeous woman, and she only dresses in heteronormative ways at two times: during the cremation and the Christmas party. She is uncomfortable at both times and changes as soon as she can. She is not allowed to be a woman in this world because it makes her stand out even more. She is already resented for occupying spaces that she would not be permitted into regardless of her qualifications, but her beauty makes her a god among men thus she feels more at home in her practical clothes.
