A stranger drifts into a small town in west Texas, taking up a position as the preacher at a rundown local church. The local lawman treats him with skeptical respect, but soon secrets from the preacher’s past catch up with him, leading to a showdown. It could be the plot from any number of vintage Westerns, and director Scott Teems draws on that history for his adaptation of Damon Galgut’s 1995 novel The Quarry. Galgut’s novel was set in South Africa (as was a previous film adaptation in 1998), but Teems moves the action to the American southwest, investing the movie with a strong sense of place even if the plot remains wispy and inscrutable.
The main character, played by Shea Whigham, doesn’t even get a name (he’s listed in the closing credits as "the man"). He’s discovered passed out on the side of a desolate highway, where a kindly stranger (Bruno Bichir) picks him up and takes him to a roadside diner to eat and drink and regain his strength. The stranger is a minister headed to the tiny town of Bevel, Texas, where he’s set to take over the local church, and he implores the man to come with him, to confess the sins he’s running from and start a new life, as the minister himself is doing.
Instead, the man gets angry and kills the minister in a fit of rage, burying him in a shallow grave at the quarry that gives the movie its title. He finds papers identifying the minister as David Martin, and he drives into Bevel under that new identity, passing himself off as the town’s new preacher. Never mind that he’s probably never been inside a church in his life, or that the community mostly made up of Mexican immigrants was expecting a minister who speaks Spanish. He reaches his small congregation by reading directly from the Bible, his words translated by the only congregant who speaks English, and soon the small church is completely filled.
The Quarry (whose title refers both to the physical location and the man’s status as a fugitive) isn’t really about a criminal posing as a minister, though. The story has a dreamlike quality that attempts to make up for its lack of believability, especially in the man’s efforts to become a credible religious leader, but it’s not as abstract as Galgut’s novel. Teems and co-writer Andrew Brotzman try to balance the surreal touches (including a heavy, droning score and dream sequences of the man buried alive) with modern social commentary about life in a Texas border town, but it’s an awkward fit.
The man’s counterpart in Bevel is Chief Moore (Michael Shannon), the head of the local police force and the only other white face we ever see in town. Moore first welcomes the new reverend, helping him file a complaint about a pair of local hoodlums who broke into his van and stripped its tires, but he soon grows suspicious, even as he rounds up the criminal brothers responsible for the theft. Like the man, Moore is a Western archetype, the one bastion of law and order in a town neglected by larger government entities. And while he’s sleeping with Mexican immigrant Celia (Catalina Sandino Moreno), the church’s administrator, he isn’t immune from crude prejudices about the Mexican immigrants (some documented, some not) who fill the town.
"You’re not a big smiler, are you?" Moore says to the man at one point, and The Quarry is mostly grim and plodding, not nearly as profound in its meditations on guilt and forgiveness as the filmmakers seem to think it is. As local small-time crook Valentin (Bobby Soto) and his kid brother Poco (Alvaro Martinez) are heavily targeted for the man’s own crimes, he’s consumed with regret, but not enough to come forward and confess. The racial dynamic that puts two Mexicans behind bars for a white man’s crime is one of the movie’s central themes, and yet it remains under-explored as Teems instead focuses on the stand-off between the man and Moore.
Whigham is a reliable character actor who often plays taciturn tough guys who are frustrated by their lack of power, and The Quarry gives him a long-overdue chance at a lead role. But the man is so closed off that Whigham has very little to work with, and his former Boardwalk Empire co-star Shannon steals the spotlight whenever he’s onscreen, just because Moore is more sly and outgoing. Neither character really progresses beyond his basic Western-genre archetype, leading to a symbolic but unsatisfying ending.
Teems previously worked on the Sundance TV drama Rectify and wrote and directed the underrated 2009 drama That Evening Sun, so he’s experienced at delivering slow, meditative stories about redemption. But The Quarry lacks the strong characters and intimate relationships of those other works, and the story is deliberately obtuse and ponderous. A vintage Western would have had the two central adversaries at a gunfight on Main Street within 75 minutes. The Quarry spends its entire running time on a meandering journey to a showdown that never comes.
Starring Shea Whigham, Michael Shannon, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Bruno Bichir, Bobby Soto and Alvaro Martinez, The Quarry is available Friday on VOD.