The Great Basin

Few people outside eastern Nevada will have even heard of White Pine County, a rural area on the border with Utah that’s home to just over 10,000 inhabitants. If it has any especially distinguishing characteristics outside ones stereotypically associated with rural counties in this part of America, The Great Basin doesn’t reveal, and while Chivas DeVinck’s well-disposed portrait offers snapshot views vaguely connected by a campaign to protect the region’s water supply from Las Vegas’ ravenous thirst, the documentary is too random to leave much of an impression. We get glimpses of conservative councilmen, activist Native Americans, brothel workers, New Age kooks and a sheep farmer convinced that Americans owe their liberties to the right to bear arms, and while it’s all reasonably interesting, it feels too arbitrary, influenced by Frederick Wiseman but without the focus.

DeVinck gives it a kind of structure by starting with a spelunking group and ending with a schoolteacher’s discussion of star clusters, though neither caves nor the galaxy are specific to White Pine County. Perhaps that’s the point, that this region is simply representative of so much of rural Western America, where wide open spaces and a wariness about government go hand in gun-toting hand. “I live on the other side of nowhere” proudly states Hank Vogler, a sheep farmer who’s joined forces with environmentalists and members of the Newe tribe (more generically called Western Shoshone) to fight Nevada’s plans to divert precious water to Vegas and Reno. Their organization, the Great Basin Water Network, and the water issue as a whole acts as a kind of artery through the documentary, but too often DeVinck gets distracted by minor tributaries.

These include a brothel, dimly lit with the usual red bulbs (has red lighting ever made anyone look beguiling?), where a couple of evangelicals come in the name of friendship and God. There’s a brief stop at a hospital in the county seat of Ely, a flying visit to the local prison, and a peculiar pause in the presumed headquarters of a sort of astral mumbo-jumbo psychic center called The School of the Natural Order. We cruise along Ely’s main drag day and night and listen to the local radio DJs talking about how this whole Coronavirus thing is overblown (filming seems to have been done throughout February 2020). The picture that emerges is too diffuse and generic to solidify any real sense of the locale, and apart from the coalition of unlikely allies making up the Great Basin Water Network, there’s nothing here to combat preconceived notions of conservative rural America. That includes the struggle of Native Americans like Delaine Spilsbury and her son Rick, engaged in a never-ending struggle to preserve their ancestral land.

Yoshio Kitagawa, who shot Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour, is the cinematographer, clearly intrigued by this world so foreign and yet so familiar from countless indie American films looking for the truth behind the myth of the West. The jazzy free-form score by Félicia Atkinson fits with DeVinck’s overall approach, sympathetic with a touch of hipster detachment in a very non-Wiseman way.