According to Kate: On the Myths and Toils of Carving Out Room to Exist

Chris Enss’ According to Kate, an adaptation of her 2019 book According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday, tries to reimagine its titular character’s life and time in the wild West as a woman who valued adventure and independence over security.

Curiously aged up but without the accompanying behavioural evolution, Kate’s (Manuela Schneider) existence for at least the first half of the film is defined by Doc Holliday (Craig Hensley). The whole premise—in 1899, a reporter hunts Kate down to get her story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral—rests on it. But as protagonist of the film, Mary Katherine Horony Cummings, aka Big Nose Kate or Kate Elder, replaces the primacy of Doc Holliday’s presence with her experience of his life—a way to locate the women within and beyond the myths of the American frontier. Simultaneously developing is the equation of understanding and compassion between the two women, Kate and the reporter, Lucy Evans (Enss). By the time the two women have met, Kate is fifty. She has matured over the years into a self-assured woman with her share of regrets, memories, and nostalgia. Lucy, similarly aged, speaks Kate’s language despite having lived a very different life. It is one of the film’s highlights, the whispers of a bond in active formation.

In comparison, the time with Doc Holliday is marked by longing and dissatisfaction. Homosociality takes precedence for Doc over the domestic pleasures of a romance. Rivals for his attention, the Earps, remain a consistent sore point. Interestingly, we never see them, as though so aggravating to Kate that she excises their visual existence from her memory. And because the film emphasises memory, specifically that of a woman destined to the confines of the sidelines, it also portrays the O.K. Corral gunfight using those limitations as a statement.

Kate’s life separate from Doc is woven into their sporadic time together, allowing the introduction of a new character, Johnny Ringo (Curt Lambert). The resulting conflict is unsurprising, and yet the film also demonstrates the relative insignificance of the conventional life. Doc or Johnny, their presence is subordinate to Kate’s determination for independence. Even in the throes of love, Kate retains her selfhood. The framing of the story—a conversation between two middle-aged women about a rough, adventurous time now preserved only in memory—allows Kate to remain both the lens and the subject.

At forty-one minutes, According to Kate works on an ambitious scale for its protagonist’s worthwhile tale. Yet, the pacing and tone do not reach for a high-octane pitch; instead, it is pensive, making room for unaired grievances and withered hopes. It is the story of a woman who would not betray herself.

Watch According to Kate Short Film Trailer