Andrew Haigh
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Connections, in both directions
But one of the beautiful things about “Weekend” – and here, it echoes the Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” – is that it spends so much time with its characters that their unexpected connection seems to be springing to life before our eyes.
Weekend is a closer match emotionally to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and its sequel, Before Sunset.
We've seen this love story before; "Before Sunrise," with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and "Certified Copy," with Juliette Binoche, come to mind.
And, not unlike Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset , a ticking stopwatch hangs over Weekend that amplifies the intensity of every conversation, every fight, every drink, every copulation.
At times reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s talky two-handers Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), Haigh’s film is at once more credible and more intimate.
The film’s Pacific Northwest milieu and scenes from the edge already recall Gus Van Sant, and Plummer somewhat spookily evokes one of Van Sant’s early muses, River Phoenix, particularly the late actor’s circa– Running on Empty era of boyish vulnerability and haunted adolescence.
Like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey last year, life spent drifting on the road in the States feels all the more engrossing when documented by an outsider looking across this sweeping foreign land.
Lean on Pete is, for all intents and purposes, a road picture, and I couldn’t help but think of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016) while watching it.
Like “American Honey” (2016), from another key British filmmaker, Andrea Arnold, “Lean on Pete” uses its young protagonist as a kind of search engine, looking for answers to his own fate and to the inequities at the heart of our nation.
The country that Haigh sets out to capture during Charley’s arduous expedition from Oregon to Wyoming (Laramie, incidentally) stems from the same one-dimensional vision that marred Andrea Arnold’s American Honey —that of the British outsider looking in and only recognizing America’s sheen (it’s in the tacky picture frames, the military references, and the utter lack of solidarity between people).
It’s a contemplative art film of subtle beauty, reminiscent of such indie dramas as “American Honey” and “Wendy and Lucy.”
With its quietly picturesque landscapes of working poor America and focused gaze on those struggling within its interiors, many might draw comparisons to Andrea Arnold’s festival favourite American Honey; but where fellow Briton Arnold’s knack for portraying the nuanced humanisms of precarity translates across the pond with ease, Haigh’s first U.S.-set picture falls short, stopping just shy of poverty porn.
For example, director Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete was very realistic in showing the good and the bad side of the Heartland of America and it only made me more invested as he struggled.
Several directors have examined working class characters in ‘middle’ America, particularly since 2016, mostly extremely sensitively, including in Lean on Pete (Andrew Haigh, 2017), Mobile Homes (Vladimir de Fontenay, 2017), Weightless (Jaron Albertin, 2017), Little Woods (Nia DaCosta, 2018), We the Animals (Jeremiah Zagar, 2018) and Leave No Trace (Debra Granik, 2018).
American movie audiences don’t like movies about “these sorts of people”; we prefer it when the poverty line is something to be crossed, and then crossed back the other way, the way Will Smith did on the road to bootstraps fame and fortune in “The Pursuit of Happyness.”
Indeed, for every Paris, Texas there is at least one This Must Be The Place.
He brings as sympathetic an eye to the struggles of young Americans as he did to the marital travails of an aging British couple in 45 Years.
He honed his teeth as an assistant editor working on a suite of Ridley Scott films – Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom Of Heaven.
There are stabbings and impalements for both human and horse alike; indeed, for all the excellent horse-led films of 2018 (The Rider, Lean on Pete), Outlaw King is an anti-horse film, as many of them succumb to the same violent battle wounds as their riders.