‘The Great Basin’ Review: A Documentarian’s Intimate Portrait of Rural Nevada

Las Vegas and Reno and midterm-election cliffhanger headlines — that’s more or less the sum of what many Americans know about Nevada. In The Great Basin, New York-based filmmaker Chivas DeVinck (The Poets) zeroes in on a section of the state’s vast rural stretches and a few of the hardy locals. With their connection to the land and their never-ending contest with the elements, these are people who are often romanticized as salt-of-the-earth emblems and, at least as often, excluded from the larger social conversation.

Anyone who’s driven Nevada’s so-called Loneliest Road in America or some other soul-testing stretch of asphalt through the unincorporated West has likely spotted an isolated house or two in the wide, wide landscape and wondered who lives there. The Great Basin offers intimate glimpses of those lives — more than an overarching argument, DeVinck’s film is a collection of vivid postcards. Working with cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa, the director captures the setting with affecting simplicity — elegant but unvarnished vistas of the mountain terrain and grasslands of White Pine County, the movie’s first evocative view of this world from a slowly moving freight train.

The onscreen events unfold in early 2020. People are starting to talk about COVID, there are one or two passing references to the upcoming presidential ballot, and Little Women is playing at the Central in Ely, a single-screen theater with a vintage Motiograph projector whose receipts probably matter little to box office prognosticators. (As I write this, the theater is showing Black Panther: Wakanda Forever).

The area’s ghost towns, of which there are many, aren’t part of DeVinck’s mosaic; though he does touch on the historical record, he’s concerned with the people who carry it into the here and now. They include a farmer and his Peruvian shepherds, barflies at the McGill Club, old-timers shooting the breeze outside the post office, employees and one of the clients at the Stardust Ranch Saloon & Brothel, hospital workers, a supermarket butcher slicing and packaging his wares, and a couple of practitioners of a New Age philosophy called the School of the Natural Order.

He begins with a small-town version of Wiseman-esque municipal procedure, as the five county commissioners, conducting their regular public meeting in the library, hear one resident’s tearful testimony about dying elm trees and discuss whether to enforce a dog-license requirement. Questioning the need for such a canine registry, one commissioner cites “a freedom/liberty perspective,” and his only female colleague bristles.

But most of the politics that surface in The Great Basin transcend party-line orthodoxies and animosities. Hank Vogler, the low-key sheep rancher who’s one of the doc’s central figures and who quietly explains why he cherishes the Second Amendment, is a vocal member of a coalition that includes fellow farmers, Indigenous people and environmentalists. Together they’ve been fighting the designs of the Southern Nevada Water Authority and developers who covet the region’s resources. A proposed pipeline from their region to Las Vegas would ensure a supply of water for populous Clark County and, the protesters warn, ultimately leave the rest of the state high and dry.

Tracing the region’s history as she looks at a map, Delaine Spilsbury, an elder in the Western Shoshone tribe who’s another key member of that anti-pipeline coalition, shares the family story of how her grandmother was orphaned as a child when all the elders in her village were slaughtered by white settlers. The Mormons who adopted the parentless children made them household servants before shipping them off to the so-called Indian schools that aimed to strip them of their language and culture.

It’s a varied and rich rural portrait that the film paints, though a few pieces, particularly toward the end, could have used more time and attention. Félicia Atkinson’s score, moving from jazz-inflected riffs to ethereal stretches, is an essential component, helping to tie together seemingly disparate fragments with a haunting sensibility. The documentary’s most eloquent motif consists of several sequences looking out through the windshield of a car as it moves, uninterrupted, along traffic-free business streets and mountain roads while local radio announcers do their thing.

DeVinck begins The Great Basin in the blackness of a cave and ends with a view of the starry night sky — poetic leaps that might not be stirring in the moment but do pose thoughtful questions about how we view the world. Like the shaggy-dog story he includes, told by a patron of the McGill Club and eliciting zero response from his friends, not everything in the doc lands, at least not instantly. But by paying attention and not rushing things, the helmer and his editors, Matthieu Laclau and Yann-Shan Tsai, honor the place they depict — a place where the seasons are long and can be unforgiving. They invite us in off the highway, and ask us to listen.