![]() ![]() Then - and only then - they scramble to confirm rumors they’ve heard about sexual harassment, drug-fueled orgies and antisemitism. The two set a date for a press conference, promising to expose a career-ending scandal. Dylan O’Brien plays Simon, a younger and sketchier bomb-thrower, who teams up with Rick to take down a rising Democratic candidate. Barinholtz plays Rick Klingman, a James O’Keefe/Jacob Wohl-like hustler who gets paid to drag left-wing politicians through the mud. In the mockumentary “Maximum Truth,” writer-comedian Ike Barinholtz brings his overconfident dim-bulb persona to a lighthearted spoof of political dirty tricksters. ‘Surrounded.’ R, for violence and language. But this is also one of those westerns with a cynical streak, where the hostility the characters are trying to escape hounds them mercilessly. Like most westerns, “Surrounded” is about people trying to reinvent themselves on the frontier. But Wright and Bell have a powerful dynamic, with her playing Mo as quietly ferocious and him playing Tommy as brashly theatrical. The dialogue is at times way too blunt and a bit anachronistic - as though the characters are reading from a modern textbook, analyzing the hardships and attitudes of 19th century pioneers. Mandler and his crew construct some striking images too, taking advantage of the stark New Mexico landscape to frame characters cleanly against a vast expanse of nothingness.įor the most part, this movie consists of a long conversation between Tommy and Mo, discussing race, violence and their own personal versions of the American Dream. Williams (in one of his final performances) as a bounty hunter who’s less sympathetic to Mo than she expects. The reason? The person holding the gun is a Black woman, Mo Washington ( Letitia Wright), who has been passing as a man ever since she signed up with the Buffalo Soldiers to free herself from slavery.ĭirector Anthony Mandler and screenwriters Andrew Pagana and Justin Thomas introduce a succession of supporting players to “Surrounded,” including Jeffrey Donovan and Brett Gelman as two stagecoach passengers and Michael K. Angling for escape, the bad guy, Tommy Walsh (Jamie Bell), promises to lead his captor to a cache of stolen money, while suggesting the two of them have more in common with each other than they do with the folks who abandoned them. ![]() Early in the film, an outlaw is chained to a tree in the middle of nowhere, guarded by one person who’s reluctantly left in charge while the rest of their traveling party has ridden off to find the law. The neo-western “Surrounded” has the kind of stripped-down premise that was common to the genre back in the 1950s, when crafty filmmakers used the backdrop of the Old West to stage intense psychodramas laced with social commentary. ![]()
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