‘Old Henry’ Review: When Past Becomes Present

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An aging farmer living away from society reveals dark dimensions of his past.

‘Old Henry” is intentionally at odds with itself, and intriguingly so. Potsy Ponciroli’s genre western with a twist spends lots of time portraying its title character as someone the world forgot, or never had any reason to remember. A taciturn farmer played by Tim Blake Nelson with an economy that could be mistaken for opacity, Henry lives in the Oklahoma Territory in 1906, works grindingly hard on his plot of land and, as a single parent whose wife died a decade ago, preaches a rigid doctrine of right and wrong to his son, Wyatt ( Gavin Lewis ), an earnest young man yearning for adventure. At the same time the film keeps hinting that Henry is not who he seems, a game that doesn’t begin in earnest until a classic image of a riderless horse appears on the rim of a hill overlooking Henry’s homestead. 

The plot seems simple enough at the outset, though not to the farmer, who must sort out the bad guys from the good. On one side is the rider, Curry ( Scott Haze ); Henry finds him gravely wounded and takes him in, along with his saddlebag, bulging with cash. On the other side is a sly sadist named Ketchum, played by Stephen Dorff. He wears a sheriff’s badge and travels with a couple of companions claiming to be his deputies; the trio has been tracking Curry down.

The story is told, strictly speaking, from an objective point of view. Tension grows as Ketchum and his cohorts demand that Henry hand Curry over to them. But Wyatt’s perspective is the most compelling one as the situation threatens to escalate into a siege. Like so many children of emotionally remote parents, he has seen his father as an impenetrable mystery—a harsh man, devoid of humor, who keeps his feelings to himself, if he has any to keep. (Tossing hog entrails into the pigs’ feeding trough, as his father instructed him to do, Wyatt asks: “Don’t it bother you sometimes they eat their own?” Henry replies, impassively, “Don’t make no difference to a hog.”) Suddenly, though, son and father are comrades in arms against an ominous threat, and one of Wyatt’s first discoveries is how many arms Henry has been keeping in the house. Another discovery, a grisly one, is just how indiscriminate hogs can be when it comes to their diet.

Tim Blake Nelson as Henry

Photo: Shout! Studios/Hideout Pictures.

The greatest reward of “Old Henry” is Mr. Nelson’s performance. Though he’s never been conventionally handsome—and his character this time is insistently scruffy—he holds the camera with a character actor’s craft and a movie star’s art. ( John Matysiak did the admirably gritty cinematography. Jordan Lehning composed the delicately elegiac score.) The film was conceived on a modest scale and should be accepted as such; it’s a finger exercise in recollection and revelation, not a sprawling drama like “The Irishman.” In other words, you’re provided sufficient clues to figure out the central mystery of identity, assuming you’re paying reasonably close attention, and there’s plenty of gunplay in the protracted climax. Still, the outcome has more resonance than you might expect. It’s about regret for a life lived with cruel heedlessness, a meditation on whether a peaceable man can outlive his violent past.

Edited November 9, 2021 by peekaboo