‘East of Wall’ review: Taming a wild story

Writer/director Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall is auto-fiction with excellent raw ingredients, but it might be in the wrong presentation.

East of a South Dakota town called Wall, Tabatha Zimiga (playing herself) is overseeing a horse rescue ranch after her partner passes away. East of Wall offers a slice of life on the ranch, which has more mouths to feed than money. The ranch not only includes rescued horses and Tabatha’s family, but also kids from rough situations in need of structure and genuine care.

Visiting businessman Roy Waters (Scoot McNairy) offers to buy the 3,000 acres with no changes, except that Tabatha’s horse-riding champion daughter Porshia (Porshia Zimiga playing herself), ride the horses that he sells. Tabatha faces this personal crossroads while dealing with the death of her last partner and the fractured relationship with her daughter. Will she sell out or will she spot the catch?

New kids in town.

Photo Credit: Sony Pictures Classics

The ensemble cast is made almost entirely of people playing a fictional version of themselves with only two actors playing characters: the aforementioned McNairy and Jennifer Ehle as you have never seen her before as Tabatha’s raucous mother. Even when playing themselves, nonprofessional actors in a fictional movie is always risky. You can get Sing Sing, or you can get The 15:17 to Paris. The good news is that despite the large cast, they’re all naturals in front of a camera. That’s probably because they’re already seasoned performers, whether riding the horses live in competition, on the ranch, in the wild, at the auction block, or on camera for TikTok. Even when the professionals are acting alongside the newcomers, it’s seamless.

The movie never really gives Tabatha space to show why or how she becomes a magnet for unwanted children and wounded horses. She’s depicted as perpetuating a cycle of chaos and abuse that she inherited from her mom, but also overcoming it slightly. There isn’t a lot distinguishing her from the parents her adopted kids are fleeing, except she’s more of a disciplinarian while giving them free rein with the horses and a chance to have something of a childhood.

Porshia functions as the infrequent narrator in East of Wall, which is largely lyrical and organic so all attempts to impose a narrative structure feel sudden and unfinished. That especially goes for the ranch sale, first being the movie’s main drama before being easily wrapped-up at the end. Roy immediately puts a chill on the place with his yelling and rough discipline of the horses, but he still yearns for a community. The innocent storyline between Porshia and Roy as a daughter without a father and a father without a daughter shows promise, but it arises and disappears just as quickly. It’s a missed opportunity to seriously explore the hinted theme of high suicide rates in that region, a provocative detail that should have more time devoted to it or omit referencing at all.

While McNairy nails his performance as the benevolent wealthy Texan with an eye for talent, his character, like many others who aren’t on the ranch, exist to stir up conflict when none is needed. It simply makes an opportunity for prose dumping about the nontraditional, communal family structure that makes Tabatha’s home special. While it’s good to show and not tell, the wrong people were telling when there was dialogue. Instead of Tabatha’s new beau, Clay (Clay Pateneaude playing himself) or Tabatha explaining her role in the community, the kids deserve to share more of their perspective on things.

Eyes on the horizon.

Photo Credit: Sony Pictures Classics

Beecroft should’ve made East of Wall a documentary that showed how the ranch and its family runs day-to-day to add a semblance of structure to what Beecroft does well: visuals. Editor Jennifer Vecchiarello toggles between the TikTok footage and the onscreen race between vehicles and Porshia riding her steed. It doesn’t feel like a disruption because she manages to mostly fill the space regardless of the format and the rapid cuts don’t drag the momentum. The rhythm of each cut keeps pace with the onscreen action and capturing the joy of the person shooting the phone clips and riding alongside in the driver’s seat. It echoes the communal experience of the ranch as if the expanding the screen from social media to movie is a widening embrace.

Cinematographer Austin Shelton gets some otherworldly landscape shots, which pairs well with the narration about the prehistoric history of Tabatha’s majestic, desolate backyard. Beecroft makes the West simultaneously feel modern and transcendent thanks to the harsh world of rodeo and ranch life, which pairs more with rock and rap than country in East of Wall. The shots of the horses and people just coexisting is as close to Eden as anyone can get post-fall. It makes the audience heard for a documentary providing more of Tabatha’s backstory: how she got the ranch, how her family adjusts to change, etc. Beecroft gives too brief glimpses of how Tabatha works collaboratively with the horse and her innate knowledge of the horses’ feelings.

Beecroft may have too much faith in moviegoers to understand everything happening on screen, particularly with training horses. Roy clearly doesn’t have the gift, and all the children look on uncomfortably, but it is unclear precisely what is happening or why it is wrong. East of Wall needed more room to show the hard-won patch of utopia in a dystopian situation exists. Instead, Beecroft highlighted the negative, which is not what distinguishes it from other movies. Even though a birthday celebration turned homemade, impromptu support group is moving because of the unfiltered candidness about sensitive matters, it feels like a one-off, not necessarily an ordinary occurrence.

The bottom line.

East of Wall is a visually sumptuous film that pairs daily ruggedness with heaven on earth imagery that characterizes the West to this day. The cast should be proud of their performances, even if Beecroft would’ve served them better to just embed and record instead of dramatizing their lives. If you don’t mind the uneven pacing and an unstructured, dramatic narrative style, you’ll see a group of unique individuals make a community that proves family is more than how the law defines it and how blood links people.

East of Wall is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Read more articles by Sarah G. Vincent here.