Rebel Ridge - or Die Hard with a Conscience

Rebel Ridge thrilled me so much that I watched it twice in one day. A political movie that reinvents heroism, a Hollywood film about the South that doesn’t poke fun at Southerners, an action movie in which justice is served - or at least begun - without any bad guys dying. It’s also one of the best edited films I’ve seen lately - as if John Sayles directed Rambo on the Bayou. Rebel Ridge starts in the middle of its first scene, and remains leanly committed to doing only what it needs to do. Set in small-town Louisiana, it follows a couple of days in the life of Terry (Aaron Pierre), a Black veteran trained in methods of de-escalation and preventing lethal harm. Attempting to bail out an at-risk cousin and begin a good enough business on which to fund a good enough life, Terry is knocked off his bicycle by two white cops (Emory Cohen and David Denman) who proceed to exercise subtle, spiteful authoritarianism. Terry knows to bite his tongue - doing everything he can to prevent even a shred of an excuse for the cops to kill him. But he needs the money because his cousin will likely die in custody; so when the cops tell him that his cash is now the subject of civil forfeiture, and will take months to get back if it can be retrieved at all we have what turns out to be a completely credible inciting indecent. 

The typical action movie would have Terry shoot his way to reimbursement, but writer-director-editor Jeremy Saulnier does something radical: here de-escalation transcends vengeance, and explosive (but contained) emotion is as exciting as a ridiculous car chase. The car chases in Rebel Ridge are not ridiculous, and therefore scarier; the fights feel like real fights in which the outcome is far from certain; the biggest threat is from ordinary people not doing the right thing. But Rebel Ridge takes place in a small town America where ordinary people also do the right thing often enough to be seen as heroes too - two honest and brave women doing the best they can, some of the cops are morally complex, one character confesses his misdeeds as much because of shame as fear of being caught.

Along with his star (and if there’s Hollywood justice, he will be one) Pierre, Saulnier marshals an unobtrusive, brilliant supporting cast - especially AnnaSophia Robb as a watchful courthouse clerk, Don Johnson as a Machiavellian police chief, and Cohen (whose two big roles this year are such a contrast in tones - here a racist rager, whereas in The Bikeriders he’s too gentle to stay in a club once it becomes a gang).

I’ve already mentioned Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo - though it’s only the first of that series, First Blood, that I’m thinking of. That was a more serious treatment of a veteran abandoned by the system; the Rambo sequels became exponentially violent and xenophobic, losing all trace of the more thoughtful considerations in the original. Like First Blood, Rebel Ridge takes place in a rural community, and focuses on a veteran who has been wronged. Unlike the later Rambo, or at least unlike how Rambo is remembered, the protagonist of Rebel Ridge has the moral vision, training, and integrity to de-escalate lethal conflict. He shows that it’s possible to confront dehumanization and physical oppression without killing anyone: a new icon of integrated masculinity. It’s one part of the antidote to the conflation of strength with aggression, and of vulnerability with weakness. 

Rebel Ridge could also be called Die Hard With a Conscience - I don’t think I’ve seen a “serious” action film set in the real world in which the protagonist is at pains, literally, not to kill even those who want to kill him. That ethic is usually associated with comic book heroes - Wonder Woman and Spider-Man are committed to non-lethal violence; Batman and Superman usually are (although their recent cinematic iterations have crossed those lines. In Batman Begins Batman and that movie’s Ultimate Villain Ra’s al Ghul are on a train hurtling toward disaster, and if Batman sticks around too long, he’ll die too; but he’s perfectly capable of giving the guy a lift home. Instead, he just chooses not to, saying I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you, a malevolence unacknowledged by the film’s reputation.)

Better, or at least more honest, is the climax of Man of Steel, where Superman agonizes over having had to kill a bad guy in order to prevent him killing an innocent family. The agony is necessary, and rare, for so many other action “heroes” just kill people and seem to forget about it. Sometimes they laugh about it first; and we’re supposed to join them. As long as the villain is portrayed as having harmed others first, then killing bad guys isn’t just ok, but the right thing to do.

In Rebel Ridge more than one life depends on Terry getting what he wants. But his training and practices align with his integrity and discernment to know that how we get things may matter as much as what we get.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark God kills the bad guys and we’re supposed to cheer, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Indy kills the bad guys and we’re supposed to laugh; in Harry Potter no solution is considered except the death of Voldemort. Guardians of the Galaxy devolves an opportunity for de-escalation into squalid murder; Deadpool is even worse, merely making a joke out of horrific violence; Joker may be the most disturbing of all - the audience is invited to identify with the central character’s murderous rage. 

But you don’t have to kill people to get what you want; you certainly don't have to kill people to make an action movie exciting; and Rebel Ridge shows that you can make an action hero guided by the Golden Rule. War movies should make us question war (Lawrence of Arabia takes violence seriously enough to show the impact on both its targets and those who carry it out) but they often conflate the horror of war with what’s right. To take one recent example, American Sniper is partly about the trauma of killing people but does not examine that being sent to kill them was a problem to begin with.

Rebel Ridge is a kind of war movie, not just about the literal wars which Terry has tried to make less harmful, but the cultural wars about how society should run itself, about haves and have nots, who belongs, and who deserves a second chance. It’s my favorite film of the year so far, and its ending - hopeful without denying tragedy - is magnificent.

There’s a joke in Austin Powers about lack of compassion for those who abet villains - Nobody thinks about the henchmen’s family. And we’ve all heard the trope about the proletarian Death Star construction laborers, who experienced Luke Skywalker’s magical overnight targeting expertise - a new kind of Force majeure - as a catastrophe. Saving the world is sometimes in the eye of the beholder; or at least what we need to be saved from. And it really does matter how the saving is done.

Rebel Ridge is available on Netflix.

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Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS: HOLOCAUST VIOLINS

I had never heard of holocaust violins until I read the obituary of Ammon Weinstein in the 3/10/24 issue of The Economist. He had a repair shop for musical instruments in Tel Aviv, where his father had come as a refugee after World War II. One day a man brought in a badly damaged violin and explained that his grandfather had been forced to play it at Auschwitz, to calm people who were walking to the gas chambers.

Weinstein began looking for more of these violins. The owner of one had played Bach Partitas outdoors in freezing weather at a labor camp. One had been left in a pawn shop in Warsaw by a young Jewish violinist who never returned. One had been tossed from a train window in France, its owner bound for a death camp shouting, “Take my violin, that it may live!” It was retrieved by a railroad worker.  

Weinstein was inspired to start visiting schools to tell students the stories of these violins. He also founded Violins of Hope, restoring over sixty of the violins so that they could be played by professional musicians in concerts in Europe and the United States. The original owners of these violins knew that music brings us home, and can outlast the evil actions of those who would silence it. I wouldn’t be surprised if in future years the instruments now being hidden by musicians who are threatened by the Taliban and other extreme Islamicist groups surface to bring hope to a new generation.