The Bygone, a feature film that had its world premiere at the 2019 deadCenter film festival on June 8, has a lot going for it.
It’s a local production, shot in Oklahoma in late 2017.
It features gorgeous cinematography by David J. Myrick, and performances from a stellar cast of experienced actors many will recognize (Animal Kingdom’s Shawn Hatosy, character actor Ritchie Coster and TV alumnus Jacqueline Toboni, just to name a few).
It’s a capable and admirable debut film from writer/directors Parker Phillips and Graham Phillips (the latter of whom also stars as the lead).
Is it beautiful and well-acted? Yes. But like any film, it is not without its missteps.
The story follows Kip Summer (Phillips), a young North Dakotan rancher who meets Waniya (Sydney Schafer), a Lakota Sioux woman who has been trapped in a sex trafficking ring run by an evil pimp named Paris (Hatosy). Kip is determined to rescue her. At the same time, Kip’s father (Jamie McShane) is struggling to keep their ranch, and turns to his oil baron brother Beckett (Coster) for help.
The writer/directors told the Oklahoman in May that they wanted to subvert Western tropes and were inspired to do the movie when they learned about the high rates of violence against Native American women.
Indeed, the film opens with title cards on this topic specifically, setting a lofty thesis for the project.
But then the first character the viewer meets, and the first voice heard in the film, is that of a man — the male protagonist, Kip. And the story continues with mostly male, predominantly white, perspectives.
This might be the result of the film becoming ensnared in the very genre standards it hoped to subvert. The filmmakers are clearly fans of the Western genre, and The Bygone would definitely fall under a neo-Western label. The story knows what beats it is meant to hit and when. Unfortunately, this also means traditional story conventions are still at play.
The old-fashioned cowboy and the lawmen are the good guys, and characters like Beckett, who represent modernity and big-money interests, are the villains. Native American characters get shuffled off to the side, and Waniya spends much of the story suffering at the hands of her abusers, unable to escape.
A very similar film, which the brothers have almost certainly seen, is 2017’s Wind River. It is also a thriller about violence against a Native American woman set against oil country, and it is also told through a mostly white, male point of view. It came under similar fire at the time for its treatment of Native American characters. The Washington Post even noted the film had an “inescapable whiff of cultural tourism.”
The Bygone sets itself up to overcome some of those obstacles, but frustratingly always falls back on what is familiar and safe about Westerns, leaving both women and Native American characters behind.
The film introduces Bear (Tokala Black Elk, who was also in Wind River) as a kind of adopted brother to Kip. He is underused and relegated to sidekick. We also meet a Native American woman (Irene Bedard) running a shelter for abused girls. The last time we see her, she’s been violently struck to the ground after trying to stand up to Paris. These are both potentially rich characters who get no time to shine.
Waniya’s journey is not the focus. She is tied up, abused, shuffled between locations. She is basically forgotten during one of Paris’ big fight sequences, left sitting in a car even though police are raiding the area just a few feet away.
She’s not the character with a backstory, like Kip, who grieves his recently deceased mother. She’s not presented with moral choices, while Kip finds himself at a crossroads between his uncle and father, oil and ranching.
The film really tries to give some agency back to her at the finale, but unfortunately, it’s too little, too late.
*Spoiler Alert*
The entire climax of
The Bygone is an odd twist that reveals Beckett is, for some reason,
really into General Custer cosplay and serial killing Native American women. He’s allowed to spew several minutes of racist garbage, and the audience has to watch Waniya be tortured and raped before she finally fights back. She also kills Paris a few minutes later, but only after Kip arrives to lead her to safety.
If you give a woman something to do at the climax of a narrative, that does not automatically transform her into a strong female character.
This critique is perhaps harsh. But the film had so much potential with its cast, high budget, and ideas. It so clearly set out to be a movie about abuses against Native American women, then didn’t allow the story to be Waniya’s or the women’s, which results in a bit of a frustrating watch.
If this had truly been about Waniya and her struggles from the beginning, with her character driving the plot and finding emotional growth and resolution,
The Bygone could have been a refreshing neo-Western with a new and exciting perspective. What we get is mostly more of the same.
