Old Henry 4K 2021 Ultra HD 2160p

Storyline
Old Henry, an action western about a widowed farmer and his son who warily take in a mysterious, injured man with a satchel of cash. When a posse of men claiming to be the law come for the money, the farmer must decide who to trust. Defending a siege of his homestead, the farmer reveals a talent for gun-slinging that surprises everyone calling his true identity into question.

User Review
Film westerns are sometimes like the dime novels that so frequently supported the tall tales therein-minimalist and fabulous. However, now and then an authentic and harrowing story like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven rides in and changes things. I also characterize Old Henry, an Amazon original starring Tim Blake Nelson in the title role, of striking out for new fictional territory, although having a whiff of Unforgiven in the telling.

Henry (Nelson) is a farmer seemingly hiding out for no reason known to anyone, certainly not his teen son, Wyatt (Gavin Lewis), who nonetheless suspects dad may be more than a simple farmer.

As writer/director Potsy Ponciroli incrementally distributes Henry's back story, the film becomes not only thrilling with possibilities but also a decidedly trenchant commentary on the outcomes of choices early in life that refuse to go away no matter how we try to escape them.

Who to trust? That's a whole other topic of this minor classic.

Enter the stranger who changes things, Curry (Scott Haze), wounded and taken in by Henry, only to be followed by a gang of desperados wanting their stolen money back from Curry. The banter between Henry and lead bad boy Ketchum (Stephen Dorff) is the stuff of terse, pulpy, and sardonic inuendo, like the opening of Tarantino's Inglourious Bastards, with Christof Waltz doing veiled threatening over a glass of milk. Ponciroli shows a dialogue talent that suggests much more than it says.

Besides dialogue, this oater has the requisite satchel of cash to move the story, which eschews the Chaucerian greed motif (think The Pardoner's Tale) to get to the heart of the matter-a dad meeting a son on common ground for survival-and the quick surrender of dad Henry's dictatorship to allow son Wyatt to grow into a heroic equal.

The landscape is stark, the cabin is spare, and yet there is depth of history for dad and care for Wyatt. The bad guys, bound for a reckoning with a hidden force in Henry, are the typical western villains who embody the ambivalence of the wide-open territory (they aren't really lawmen bringing justice to the frontier), fraught with danger but a promise of a new life redeemed from violence but not after violence has a hand. As in Eastwood, combating an evil past and setting the record straight requires heroism of a small but symbolically significant consequence for these little lives on the Western plains.

Henry is a player of consequence, a part of history told in one of the cleverest reveals ever. Old Henry is a small adventure that means more than it appears. On Prime.