Whatever. Hardly ever does the motion picture industry portray having any clue about rural and small-town America, and this was by no means any exception. Within the first few seconds the intent was already clear: rusty, squeaky oil rigs and grey old abandoned buildings accompanied by sinister music, and I'm already braced for what was sure to come and did. Small farm towns, according to movie people, are full of angry disaffected losers, drunken violent young white males and crumbling businesses and institutions, and not much else. The reference to the new motel "out by the interstate" pops up over and over as a sort of otherwise needless symbol of progress and the resistance to it. I guess it never occurred to the writers that such a place would be staffed with locals and that the interstate highway isn't some foreign country or alien invasion in their world.
Nor are farmers stupid, nor are custom harvesters some anonymous gang of dangerous drifters, nor does anybody ever cut corn in a 160-acre center-pivot field by themselves. That combine doesn't hold the grain any longer than it takes to chute it into the grain cart running alongside, driven by a second inevitable witness to the dead body but absent from this story, nor does the grain cart hold more than about a quarter of what it takes to load the semi-trailer parked at the end of the row, driven by a third witness who also never appears in the story nor do either of the two essential pieces of machinery. Center-pivot farming is a high-dollar operation backed by hefty finances and performed by intelligent, worldwise men and women who typically have been around this big old world outside their home towns more than you can possibly imagine, and who have spent lifetimes learning everything from crop expertise to heavy equipment mechanical skills, and how to hire reliable contract harvest people that for the most part they have worked with for many years and know very well.
Plus, the Angry White Male narrative is alive and well here: for good guys/gals we have a female sheriff with violent ex-husband issues, a sixteen-year-old pretty motel clerk with daddy-abandonment issues and a neanderthal boyfriend, and near the end a grim-faced female federal officer with a black male boss, etc, etc. Of course all the bad guys are white males, except for the other ones who are inept cops and fat business owners stuck in 1955 by the look of them. The waitress jokes about everything being as obsolete as the old film camera in the story, the sheriff drives a truck of a vintage I haven't seen in years as if nothing else is available, the boyfriend totes an old break-action goose gun no modern country boy would be seen outdoors with, and on and on and on.
If you're an urbanite looking to have your biases about where your food comes from confirmed, you're sure to be vindicated here. If on the other hand you have ever actually spent more than an hour beyond The Last Exit in your lifetime, this is so uninformed and unrealistic it should have been billed as comedy.
