‘East Of Wall’ Captures Real Beauty, But Also Misses Deeper Truths

(REVIEW) “East of Wall” is a heartwarming and raw story about overcoming hardship and helping others. Unfortunately, its unusual style both helps and hinders our ability to connect with the people and experiences at the center of the drama.

The film follows Tabatha — a young, tattooed and rebellious horse trainer — who, after the death of her husband, wrestles with financial insecurity and unresolved grief while providing refuge for a group of wayward teens on her broken-down ranch in the Badlands.

Director Kate Beecroft met the real-life Tabitha on another project and was so amazed by her and the kids who lived with her, she wanted to tell their story. But she didn’t want to make it a pure documentary because she didn’t want to fully expose the kids in that way. She wanted to keep some fictional elements to give them a kind of shield.

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“When it is somewhat fiction, they don’t feel so naked,” Beecroft said in a recent interview. “I don’t want to put these kids in a position where they feel naked. It just wasn’t fair, but it also wasn’t fair for their artistry.”

So she used the real Tabitha, real kids, real family as the actors and then made a fictional story around them and added real actors. Jenefer Ehele (played by Elizabeth Bennet from “Pride and Prejudice”) is Tabitha’s mom. Scott McNairy (“Speak No Evil” and “A Complete Unknown”) plays a rancher who tries to hire her to train horses and attempts to buy Tabitha’s ranch. The result is a film that blends reality and fantasy.

“It is absolutely insane, and I look back on it, and I’m not a religious person, but it was just something was moving me, how everything slotted into place,” Beecroft said.

East of Wall” went on to win the audience award in the NEXT category at the Sundance Film Festival. However, this is not the first film to do a “docu-fiction” style. Nor is it the first I’ve reviewed from this unusual genre. I very much enjoyed last year’s film “Sing Sing’l about a prison theater company that featured many real-life members of that troupe playing themselves. I also really liked this year’s “The Damned,” which told a story of soldiers in the Wild West who let the non-actor actors themselves determine much of the dialogue.

As such, I can see many of the same virtues in this film I saw in those. The cinematography is beautiful. The shots of the wide-open spaces are glorious, those of the people and the horses intimate and the documentary style brings authenticity. This style of filmmaking does really well at capturing “moments” of beauty and realness that are oftentimes missed with a movie that is overscripted. The kids played with each other, laughing and teasing one other. A look of joy on a horse. Grief and anger as women tell their stories of abuse. These snippets, because they’re captured rather than over-written and performed, have a ring of truth that you can’t always get when everything is planned out according to a director’s vision rather than discovered in the moment of a performance. The theme of taking care of others through foster care is also deeply powerful.

But on the flip side, the film falls into the same problems I noticed in fellow docu-fiction films like “Sing Sing” and “The Damned”: They capture moments well, but not the details that give those moments meaning (although “The Damned” does the best of any of these).

The beautiful moments they capture are real, but they lack richness because we don’t know enough about these people to respond to them as individuals. They are strangers having a real moment, not friends.

A few of the teens and the adults get details told about them. Jesse, we know, had a father in prison and that he wants Tabitha to be his guardian — but we know very little beyond that. We obviously learn about Tabitha, her husband, her mother and her daughter. But the details of their relationship and grief don’t go beyond details that we’ve seen a dozen times before in similar dramas. There’s little to connect us to them beyond archetypes.

As one example, one thing left out of the story is how the rest of the town views Tabitha. As Beecroft explained: “I think that’s also why she’s not accepted in the community of Wall, which I don’t really talk about too much in the film, but she’s not accepted there. She’s really an outcast and there are a lot of conspiracy theories about her. She’s kind of this myth in this town, they’re like, ‘Oh, Tabby. She’s like the witch who lives on the mountain.’”

I should note that there’s one half-joking reference by a man who says his wife thinks she’s a witch. Beecroft said that she also found Tabitha and the kids incredibly intimidating when she met them.

Already this makes these people far more interesting than they came across in the film. Is the town scared of them? They’re strange enough that a sympathetic party finds them intimidating. And yet they’re such good salt of the earth people. That’s really compelling to me. Yet very little of that came across in the film.

Faith is another example. One of the things that faith does for people is give them details about them that make the characters personal. There’s one reference to faith in the movie where someone says they’ll pray for Tabitha and the girls. There’s another where Tabatha says that her husband was a Christian, which meant that while he wanted to kill himself many times, he wouldn’t because he feared going to hell.

But they never dig deeply into those questions or issues of faith. Nor do they tell us what she believes, what her mother believes, what Clay believes or what her daughter believes. Understanding what people believe is one way to try and figure out who they are, while understanding and connecting with them more deeply.

Sometimes people think keeping those details invisible makes these people more universal and therefore more relatable. But those are not the same thing. Universality removes some barriers to relatability, but it also creates its own barriers. People can’t relate to someone that doesn’t have a particularity to them because the particularity is what makes them a “someone” to relate to.

“East of Wall” is a beautiful movie about a beautiful group of people who live a very beautiful life in their own way. If the film had given life to more of the details of what made these people so interesting, thie movie could have soared even higher.