It’s a simple weekend away: The Talbotts, Georgia and Mac (Ash and Sullivan), invite their old friends from New Jersey, Melanie and Cory Price (Kull and Harner), to stay at their place just outside of Big Bend. Bring the kids, hang out, throw back some brewskis, get a little high while the kids are in bed, just watch out for snakes.
Of course, trips like this are never that simple, and the biggest perils are never some venomous crittur hanging out under a rock. They’re the emotional landmines that everyone packed in their luggage, the dangers that everyone recognizes and everyone jokes about but no one wants to take too seriously. It’s the rumbling boiler in the basement, the car carrying eight people but only seats and seatbelts enough for seven. Most ambiguously of all, it’s the bearded, rough-hewn stranger (Masciangelo) whose unstated mission seems set to intersect with the families’ trajectory across this sun-blighted land.
Inspired by a real trip that writer/director Brett Wagner and producer Aaron Brown took to Terlingua in 2018, The Big Bend has finally meandered to screens after debuting at the Austin Film Festival in 2021. The setting would infer either some kind of desert survival horror or a psychedelic trip, but the fear is much more internalized, and the last time these parents took shrooms was probably back in college (except maybe the manchild Mac, who Sullivan fills with good ol’ boy enthusiasm and delayed adolescence). Under the petit bourgeois stability there’s a deeper despair that has become subtext to all those conversations about fibroids and shrinking bank accounts. It’s not just that the two marriages are in peril – for very different reasons – but that the lives of all four are quietly on the verge of catastrophic change.
There’s a level of small, intimate observation behind the ticking clock tension (much of it provided by the menacing knocking coming from that old boiler) that evokes the nonjudgmental morality tales of Éric Rohmer. But the French director concentrated on twentysomething angst, and here the kids complicate everything. Every judgment has to revolve around parenthood, and Wagner somehow finds the space between Le Beau Mariage and On Golden Pond.
Like that Jane and Henry Fonda classic, this is also a family affair, with Wagner’s daughters playing the Price’s kids. That somehow amplifies the underlying fear of failing as a parent that permeates every part of the Prices’ and the Talbotts’ lives, and Kull is most especially touching as a woman holding everything together as it all starts to slip away.There’s an intimacy that survives the intrusion of that mysterious stranger, a subplot that verges on the fantastical, but then this version of West Texas is a little mystical. Gorgeously filmed by Paul Atkins (who, suitably, cut his teeth as a natural history documentarian), and with a melancholic score from Austin’s own Shakey Graves, it’s a shimmering version of West Texas that still has a truthful grit to it.
This article appears in May 31 • 2024.
