will you still love me?
by
Douglas Messerli
Andrew
Haigh (screenplay, based on the book by Willy Vlautin) and director Lean on
Pete / 2017, USA 2018
Like
all previous Andrew Haigh movies, his newest Lean on Pete (from 2017,
2018) is a quiet study about characters. There is something so honest
and straight-forward about Haigh’s films that you almost don’t want to intrude
upon them; they seem to be documents, without the apparatus of “documentation,”
of real people so deeply felt that it’s hard, a moments, to watch—despite the
fact that they are never for a moment sentimental. The folks he portrays are
tough survivors, a young British gay man living a relatively straight life, but
dipping each night as he escapes his straight friends into local gay bars; a
couple who suddenly are faced with an event before their marriage wherein they
must face a love beside their own; and in this work, a gentle hometown boy, living
basically in a neglected relationship with his philandering father, who falls
in love with a now-old and not-so-glorious, race horse.
Yet, the ode-eyed Charlie seems almost unable to complain. He was, apparently, a football and perhaps racing hero in his brief education at a local school, and he stills runs every morning, long distances, putting him in touch with a nearby Portland racing track. Looking for a job (his father gives him only a few dollars on which he might survive the day), Charlie encounters a horse-trainer, the more than slightly sleazy Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), who has a stable of horses which he literally runs to their deaths, winning sometimes in small tracks from Oregon to Mexico, but quickly selling his race-horses when they have lost their abilities to run into their deaths, either as horse-meat or glue.
Del loves the young boy for his eagerness
to work, mucking out the horse shit, and willingly leading the horses to their trailer
for the voyages south and north. The fact that Charlie is willing to sleep in
the car or on the straw of the horse bin gives us another insight into how
difficult his life has been; besides Del pays him 50-60 dollars for each event,
a huge amount surely for a boy who has never previously had any money to even
buy himself a lunch.
And even if Del, when it comes to horses,
is more than detestable, when it comes to Charlie he does, in some respects,
serve as a kind of father, scolding Charlie for his table manners as the kid
chows down what he is served in a local restaurant the moment the plate is put
before him. Again, we comprehend, without the director telling us, just how
starved this boy is. But Dell’a upbraiding him as having no manners is also one
of the first times, we recognize, that Charlie has ever received any parental advice.
The scene is so painful and uplifting, that we want to cry and applaud at the
very same moment. Haigh is able to achieve these contradictions by simply
presenting his characters in a way that we recognize their flaws and their
failures simultaneously. Judgment is not really in Haigh’s vocabulary.
After winning a couple of races, Lean on
Pete, who comes in last in a race in which Charlie has begged Bonnie to ride
instead of the final winner, on whom she had sat.
If things weren’t bad enough for young
Charlie, his father is brutally beaten by the husband of the secretary which he
has brought home, and the boy, demanding a neighbor call 911, visits the hospital
to discover his father in serious condition. Forced to work now just so the two
of them might survive, Charlie returns to the hospital to find his dad has
died.
When he hears that Del has just sold
Lean on Pete to Mexico his heart, driven now by pain and loss, forces him to
escape with the horse with Del’s van in an attempt to reunite with his aunt,
obviously kept out of his life by his father, fearing her attempts to claim that
she should care for his son.
The movie thus transforms into kind of “on
the road” film, in the tragic manner of Thelma and Louise. No,
fortunately, they do not leap off the Grand Canyon, but in their long trek from
Oregon to Wyoming, to a destination of which Charlie is not very sure off, they
do suffer the problems that might make anyone leap off a cliff. When the car
breaks down, the boy is forced to abandon it, walking his horse through a
territory with often little water and food. The boy is starved, but so is the
horse, and at one unpredictable moment, leaps away from his caring human to be
hit by an automobile which kills him.
In a kind a classic Haigh scene, Charlie
attempts to revive the horse who is quite clearly now dead, while having to
just as quickly remove himself from the scene before he is discovered. Once
again, the director, retreats from what might have been bathos, through the inevitable
instincts of the young boy, who has thoroughly learned to evade the dangers in
which he has so long been embraced. Is it a crime to love? the film seems to
ask.
After a great deal of difficulty, he
does finally discover his aunt Margy (Alison Elliott), who greets him with open
arms, truly willing to care for him. But the now disillusioned child can only
ask, if he needs to go to jail will she still care for him. Charlie, we
perceive, is a child destroyed by the world around him. We can believe in his
salvation or not. Haigh doesn’t provide us with an easy answer, thank heaven.
It is up to us, with our personal doubts and empathy to provide the answer.
I suggest that if you see this movie
(and you should), you also read Jaimy Gordon’s important book Lord of
Misrule, a fictionalized version of a young woman who lived apparently a
life in racetracks not unlike that of Charlie Thompson.
Los
Angeles, August 4, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2019).
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