East of Wall signals right away that it’s a modern Western, starting with TikTok videos that the main characters have made of their horses. Contemporary cowboys have been doing this for years, but it has taken movies a few years to catch up with that reality. This film, which opens this week at some Tarrant County theaters, gets there first, but that’s not all that Fort Worthers (especially those familiar with horses) might find notable about it.
The idea for the film came when British actress Kate Beecroft took a road trip around the Rockies and encountered Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga, a mother and teenage daughter living on a 3,000-acre ranch in South Dakota. They weren’t alone — Tabatha took in local kids whose parents wouldn’t or couldn’t take care of them, and the kids helped her and Porshia raise horses for sale, hence the TikTok videos to promote them. Rather than make a documentary film about them, Beecroft crafted a script based heavily on their lives and cast them as characters much like themselves.
The story revolves around a rancher from Fort Worth (Scoot McNairy) who sees that Tabatha is barely breaking even despite her skill with the animals and offers to buy her property while keeping her and her kids on to tend the land and the horses. The other kids obliquely allude to the prospect of selling the horses at the Stock Show.
This is Beecroft’s first feature as a director, and it has some troubles that you might expect from a debut filmmaker. The Texan’s sale offer is resolved all too readily, and so too are the heavy psychological issues between mother and daughter stemming from Tabatha’s husband’s suicide. The wispy story means that this film feels less substantive than others like it. (Nomadland comes to mind.)
Beecroft is much better with atmosphere, with awe-inspiring drone shots of the South Dakota Badlands paired with Porshia’s narration about how the terrain came to be. These are cut with ambience-filled scenes at the corral where Tabatha works with the horses and the venues where she sells them under market value because she needs the cash. Just as much part of the atmosphere are the screen presences of the Zimiga women, as Porshia is an accomplished trick rider and Tabatha is a steely presence as a hard-swearing woman who lays down the house rules for new arrivals at her ranch. They blend in seamlessly with professional actors like McNairy and Jennifer Ehle as Tabatha’s mother, which is a tribute to everyone involved.
Then, too, there’s the emotional pull of a scene when the women of the community gather around a campfire to unload their troubles, with Tabatha’s mother admitting to hitting baby Tabatha after her own husband accidentally killed himself, and Tabatha describing finding her husband after his suicide and giving CPR to a man who was obviously dead. These people may be on social media, but it’s still the old ways that help them face the travails of the world. Maybe East of Wall doesn’t have much new to say about the hardscrabble lives lived in this remote area of the country, but I do feel like the 97 minutes that I spent in these people’s company was well worth my time.
East of Wall
Starring Tabatha Zimiga and Porshia Zimiga. Written and directed by Kate Beecroft. Rated R.
