East of Denver

May 28, 2012
In his promising debut, Hill wrings lightness from a hopeless situation. Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams returns to the eastern Colorado farmland of his childhood and discovers that his widower father’s senility has worsened. Inside a locked bathroom, Emmett Williams’s elderly caretaker is “dead, fat, bloated.” So Shakes moves in to look after his ailing pa, who, though he sold his Cessna to a local banker for $20 and neglected to renew the government relief lease on his land, still has a knack for mechanics and witty one-upmanship. This, as well as the duo’s small triumphs in the garden, misadventures on a homemade motorcycle, and visits to a “fat, naked paraplegic” sustain their spirits. But bills mount and foreclosure looms, and Shakes’s high school buddies devise a plan: rob a bank with Emmett as safecracker. Though Shakes’s psychic paralysis is palpable, it’s hard to understand when he admits, “I didn’t want to call for help.” If Shakes revealed what stalled his life’s takeoff back in Denver—before his parents were ill—it might be clearer why he refuses to look for at least one parachute during his father’s nosedive.