Under its pretense of social commentary, The Stolen Valley is really just a dumbed-down Tex-Mex Thelma & Louise with a happy ending.
There is a brief prologue with a few shots that will make precious little sense in context and are downright random in a vacuum. The movie proper opens “20 Years Later.” What we just saw told us absolutely nothing, so the question is, 20 years later than what exactly?
Shortly thereafter, we get a flashback to Adalmina (Paula Miranda) telling her preteen daughter Lupe (Tiffany Morales) the story behind the prologue. I would normally wonder why they didn’t get rid of the prologue and just keep the storytelling scene. Not this time, though, because what Adalmina tells young Lupe isn’t what happened either.
I understand that they were going for the whole ‘secrets and lies’ thing, but surely there must be a simpler way to achieve that. Confusion should not be mistaken for mystery; the film appears to force suspense through misinformation rather than letting the story unfold naturally.
Back in the present, Adalmina comes down with a brain tumor, the only symptom of which is a nagging coma that Adalmina keeps drifting in and out of depending on the requirements of the plot.
It’s up to a grown-up Lupe (Briza Covarrubias) to search for Carl (Micah Fitzgerald), the father she thought was dead, and ask him to help pay for Adalmina’s medical bills. Carl “owns Alta Valley” and is presumably loaded.
As Lupe will discover, Carl is not the valley’s rightful owner, and he’s trying to screw the local Navajos out of their land because he has found oil. Alta Valley actually belongs to Adalmina, but she left there in a hurry when she was pregnant with Lupe, ostensibly to get away from Carl — although, oddly, she only got as far as a couple of hours by bus.
Yada yada yada Lupe finds herself torn between selling the land anyway, which would make her rich enough to pay for Adalmina’s treatment a few times over, or giving it back to the Navajos.
But wait, isn’t Adalmina the only person who can make that decision? Oh, right; she’s back in the coma. I guess writer/director Jesse Edwards was under the impression that whoever’s physically holding the deed at any given time is the landowner. Either that or I missed the part where Adalmina was conscious long enough to grant Lupe power of attorney. And I did miss it. Because it wasn’t there.
Long before that, however, Lupe falls in with Maddie (Allee Sutton Hethcoat), a loose cannon rodeo cowgirl who keeps getting into jams that Lupe has to keep bailing her out of (once literally bailing her out of jail). Maddie gets Lupe chased after and shot at, but for some unfathomable reason, Lupe insists that Maddie is helping rather than hindering her.
In the right hands, the tale of Lupe’s quest could have been made into a compelling road movie. Unfortunately, Edwards wasn’t thinking big enough and settled instead for a conventional storyline that failed to truly explore the potential depth of Lupe’s journey.
Like I mentioned above, Lupe’s roots are a mere two-hour bus ride away. Moreover, everyone in this fucking movie is related. For instance, the Navajo matriarch whose family is the only one Carl is ever seen trying to forcefully evict, just happens to be Adalmina’s mother and Lupe’s grandmother.
Even Maddie turns out to be another one of Carl’s estranged daughters (whilst looking for the deed in Carl’s house, Lupe finds an old photo of a little blonde girl; from there, Lupe leaps to the conclusion that Carl is Maddie’s father, and we’re expected to jump alongside her).
What a contrived fucking coincidence, and completely unnecessary considering that the character of Maddie herself is utterly extraneous. The Stolen Valley had no business being a buddy action flick, but since it is one, couldn’t Lupe and Maddie have established a sisterly bond as a result of their shared experiences? Did they improbably have to be long-lost sisters as well? It feels like a lazy plot device to force a connection between characters that could have been developed more organically.
I suppose the takeaway from the story is that we’re all brothers and sisters, parents and children, regardless of skin color. A little too on the nose, this message, and yet it manages to get lost in the shuffle of high-speed chases, shootouts, laughable CGI fires, and sugar glass windows that characters hurl themselves through only to emerge on the other side miraculously unscathed, when in reality they should be all cut up and bleeding like stuck pigs. Despite the heavy-handed moralizing, the lack of realism in the film detracts from any meaningful impact it could have had.