A young black man, stetson hat perched at an angle to conceal his face, places a candle on the altar in a small rural church. He walks out the door and down Mainstreet, little more than a silhouette against the sun setting on a typical Western landscape. Hills, mountains and dusty trails in the background behind him, whilst bars, fire pits and other buildings spring up in irregular beats as he walks down the road. Cloaked in shadow, the individual walks into a bar, takes a seat and, after handing over his gun, asks for a drink.
So starts any number of generic cowboy yarns, but rather than the ‘man with no name’ we might expect, we quickly learn that this Cowboy is, in actuality, a Cowgirl.
In Anthony Mandler’s Surrounded, Mo Washington (Letitia Wright) is passing as a man in a bid to remain unnoticed under the watchful eyes of a misogynist and incredibly racist society, still being dragged kicking and screaming from the purported ‘heyday’ of slavery, now five years on from the close of the American Civil War. Seeking a better life out West and brandishing a deed for land that might contain a literal gold mine, Mo purchases a stagecoach ticket, alongside a group of white travelers who quickly dismiss ‘him’ to the outside luggage rack on the back of the coach. The other customers, in addition to the overtly racist driver, care so little for black people that they don’t bother to spend any time looking at him – they don’t see her – and it’s only because of their racism, that Mo is given the opportunity to pass.
As is to be expected, Mo’s stagecoach is intercepted by a ‘Billy the Kid’ type outlaw known as Tommy Walsh (played with relish by Jamie Bell), who in a turn of events is actually subdued by the stagecoach party, but left for Mo to guard as others seek the law’s help. From here, the film distills itself down to a compelling visual metaphor: it is the white man who finds himself in chains, rather than Wright’s Mo, an engagingly tense, if somewhat blatant, narrative conceit used as a springboard for a 1:1 confrontation between historical oppressor and oppressed.
‘We’re free, but we have no place to be free’ remarks Mo, echoing a central theme of Surrounded, a revisionist Western that deconstructs the genre from the vantage point of 21st-century representational politics. It is a film primed to throw the established genre rule book out of the window, inverting the usual tropes of the Western for a contemporary concern with race and the horrific legacy of slavery, whilst still managing to deliver the shoot-outs and show-downs one would expect of this brand of cinema. It is done though, with all the seriousness that the subject deserves, never tipping over toward farce or cheap claims for (mostly plastic) representation (see: Django Unchained).
There is a certain degree of contrivance here, but Surrounded works best as a platform for its lead performances, ironically helmed by two British actors in what is arguably the most ‘American’ of film genres. The interplay between the two leads (as well as a scene-stealing turn from the late Michael K. Williams), really showcases the talent at work, allowing for the full range of dramatic performance and nuance, particularly in relation to Wright whose acting ability is yet to have been properly recognised (maybe this is my own oversight).
Coming in at a sweet-spot 100-minute runtime, Surrounded doesn’t outstay its welcome, offering classical Western tropes filtered through a more modern sensibility. It’s probably not a film that will linger long in your memory, but for a low-key, performance-driven genre effort, Surrounded routinely hits its target with the precision of Mo Washington’s six-shooter.
Notes from the Multiplex 