The Mustang - 2019
Updated: Sep 28, 2022
The Mustang was my dark horse picture of the year (no pun intended), much like last year's majestic The Rider. Both were gripping, personal, emotive heart-on-the-sleeve tales of broken men and their healing connections with animals. The difference? Well, The Rider landed at number 1 for me in 2018. The Mustang sits here at 15.
Now that is by no means a dig. This film was probably the most underappreciated of 2019, in my opinion. Simply put, it got no love anywhere, and that's a shame. Matthias Schoenaerts plays the convict Roman, a quiet, intensely pained man who just can't outrun the anger in his past - a rage which led to devastating consequences. Roman, like other selected convicts, is soon forced into a rehabilitation program whereby prisoners attempt to tame wild mustangs gathered from the nearby Nevada plains.
Schoenaerts finds a sort of soul connection with one of the fiercest mustangs of the group, his own unbridled nature matched pitch for pitch with the animal's native wildness. Humanity and nature together is a theme oft-explored, but not generally this well. The Mustang is shot in such a way that it appears like a quasi-documentary. Its realism is perfect for the subject matter. The film never soft peddles how dangerous these men really are or the desperation of their circumstances. Rather, The Mustang is far more interested in a soulful rumination on the natures of freedom and imprisonment, what it's like to be caged, and the ways we seek to rehabilitate our cruder sides.
In a year this loaded, I can't say that I'm actually disappointed that no one noticed Schoenaerts' performance. But, I would argue that he was perfectly matched for the part. Schoenaerts has this impeccable way of saying as much in silence as he does in monologues. He's so adept at communicating through facial expressions BIG feelings like anguish or the faintest seeds of hope. In the middle of the film, we meet Roman's daughter for the first time, and come to realize why he is in the prison. Later she returns in need of something else from him. Those two sequences, filled with anger in the former case and weeping in the latter, are as good as anything else I watched in 2019 from a male actor. See it for yourself, and you can testify the truth with me.
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