By Thomas M. Puhr.
Even at its bleakest – and it features some shockingly meanspirited turns of fate – the film keeps one eye on being a good time at the movies.”
Francis Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023) opens with a bird sitting atop an empty pump at a gas station. A car approaches. The unnamed driver (Jim Cummings) learns the pumps are plumb dry. He’s welcome to wait in the attached diner for the fuel truck to arrive, a friendly attendant (Faizon Love) tells him. As if he has any choice; nothing but desert surrounds them, and the next station is a hundred miles away. Unlike that bird, he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Inside the sweltering diner – the AC is broken, naturally – he strikes up a conversation with the sole waitress, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue). He’s a knife salesman on his way to visit his estranged daughter; she’s the bored wife of the town sheriff, Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.). A green Pinto pulls up, carrying two men who’ve just pulled off a bank heist and a trunk full of cash. The salesman instantly recognizes them – he heard the car’s description on the radio – and so the group finds itself at an impasse. The robbers have no choice but to also wait for that fuel truck, or for a car with a full tank to pull up. In the meantime, Charlotte and the salesman are told to keep their mouths shut and act natural, if they want to stay alive. As more unsuspecting customers – all packing heat: This is Arizona in the 1970s, after all – pile in, the pieces are put in place for a good old-fashioned standoff.
With its claustrophobic setting and limited cast of characters, The Last Stop in Yuma County hinges largely on its performances. And Galluppi has assembled quite the ensemble of indie mainstays. Besides Cummings and Donahue (both wonderful), we also get Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan as the odd-couple robbers (with his beautiful, gravelly voice, Brake in particular seems to have been born for slimy roles like this); Gene Jones (whose legacy will always be his scene-stealing turn as the gas station quarter guy in No Country for Old Men, 2007) and Robin Bartlett as sleepy roadtrippers; Connor Paolo as an unbearably green rookie cop; and Sierra McCormick and Ryan Masson as small-time crooks who (much to their perverse delight) also recognize the robbers.
And just when you start to get weary of watching people uneasily sitting in a diner, the writer-director floods the screen with ruthlessly efficient, bloody mayhem….”
The success of a movie like this also hinges on its unpredictability, its ability to utilize a confined space to build and release tension. Whereas other debut filmmakers may be tempted to pad this simple setup with unnecessary subplots or complicate it with showy time jumps, Galluppi wisely keeps things tight and lean – focusing, for instance, on Charlotte’s ongoing efforts to reach her husband, or the constant fear that a new customer will notice the diner’s severed telephone cord. And just when you start to get weary of watching people uneasily sitting in a diner, the writer-director floods the screen with ruthlessly efficient, bloody mayhem before taking his narrative beyond the diner and letting it breathe in surprising ways.
Although Galluppi avoids death by subplot, he falls prey to other Tarantino-isms that continue to haunt off-kilter crime dramas some thirty years after Pulp Fiction (1994). As the wisecracking Sybil and Miles, McCormick and Masson spout the pop culture references of a first-year film student; when Sybil compares herself and Miles to Bonnie and Clyde, her boyfriend retorts that he’d rather be Kit and Holly of Badlands (1973). And a literal needle drop – complete with footage of characters moodily looking around while steadying their weapons in slow motion – nearly spoils the deliciously violent set piece that follows. Nearly. The shootout is still an absolute blast.
Perhaps most importantly, The Last Stop in Yuma County doesn’t take itself too seriously. Even at its bleakest – and it features some shockingly meanspirited turns of fate – the film keeps one eye on being a good time at the movies. In this way, Galluppi reminded me more than once of the Coen Brothers in his ability to elicit a chuckle without winking too conspicuously at the viewer or spoiling the very real stakes of his drama. Though he can be a bit on the nose (The Grass Roots’ “Live for Today” features in a scene about greed), this quality sometimes work in his favor: The last shot, in which a symbol is literally thrown in our face, is particularly effective.
Word has it Galluppi has been tapped to write and direct the next Evil Dead installment. It’ll be interesting to see what he can do with that franchise (and, surely, a few more dollars to his budget). Is it too much to hope for an Evil Dead set in a sunbaked desert?
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published “‘Mysterious Appearances’ in Jonathan Glazer’s Identity Trilogy: Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin” in issue 15.2 of Film International. His book Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema is available from Wallflower Press.