The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)
Directed by Tyler Nilson
A down-on-his-luck crab fisherman embarks on a journey to get a young man with Down syndrome to a professional wrestling school in rural North Carolina and away from the retirement home where he’s lived for the past two and a half years.
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28 films that influenced The Peanut Butter Falcon
What critics say influenced The Peanut Butter Falcon
The story is accompanied by gorgeous cinematography that evokes fellow South-set indies like Mud or Beasts of the Southern Wild in the way it finds strange magic and beauty in abandoned, overgrown places.
Inspired by Huckleberry Finn, Southern Gothic fiction, and reminiscent of boys-on-the-run films by David Gordon Green (especially Undertow) and Jeff Nichols (especially Mud), Falcon is an adventure story where innocence and sin, play and danger often intersect.
As long as these two are just shooting the breeze, The Peanut Butter Falcon has an easygoing charm that recalls Mud.
At times, “The Peanut Butter Falcon” might remind viewers of a pair of 2012 films “Mud” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which also followed humble characters in coastal environments.
“The Peanut Butter Falcon” is an unassuming winner of a summer odyssey, a low-cost and bittersweet “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with hints of “Rain Man” and “Mud” about it.
Like “Mud” or “Undertow,” the swamps and humid fields are shot by cinematographer Nigel Buck of HBO’s “True Detective” with a gritty sharpness.
It’s because like Rain Man, Awakenings, Forrest Gump and countless other films featuring a character with cognitive disabilities, Gottsagen plays a childlike innocent, almost a Holy Fool.
We are used to seeing developmentally-able actors playing developmentally-disabled characters, like Sean Penn in I Am Sam , Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape , Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man , Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi in The Other Sister , and John Malkovich in Of Mice And Men , to name just a few.
Like a southern-fried variation on “Rain Man,” Gottsagen’s Zak and LaBeouf’s Tyler have a sweet-and-sour chemistry that propels this curious little road movie further than one would expect.
One picture surely on the creators’ list of inspiration would be Rain Man , which brought awareness to autism, but which also received criticism for casting Dustin Hoffman as the disabled genius.
Gottsagen’s character was specially written for him by Nelson and Schwartz and it proves essential to making this Huckleberry Finn meets Rain Man crossover work.
While “The Peanut Butter Falcon” doesn’t neatly fit into any particular genre, it clearly takes its inspiration from movies like “Rain Man,” putting newcomer Zack Gottsagen front and center as a pair of unlikely amigos undertake a road/salt-water-rafting trip down the coast to Florida.
The story is accompanied by gorgeous cinematography that evokes fellow South-set indies like Mud or Beasts of the Southern Wild in the way it finds strange magic and beauty in abandoned, overgrown places.
At times, “The Peanut Butter Falcon” might remind viewers of a pair of 2012 films “Mud” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which also followed humble characters in coastal environments.
And the opening few minutes of the actual movie, in which our hero attempts a cute and kooky jailbreak while a banjo-tinged b-side from the “Beasts of the Southern Wild” score wails on the soundtrack, seem determined to confirm your most cynical suspicions.
A sense of endearing earnestness and fantastical realism bear-hugs the whole of The Peanut Butter Falcon and fans of Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild will find similarly soulful fantasy riddled with American pathos.
There are worse things you can say about a film than it's like Beasts of the Southern Wild if Frank Darabont directed it.
This quirky indie buddy movie’s basic premise strongly recalls the largely forgotten Belgian dramedy The Eighth Day , for which Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne (who likewise has Down syndrome) jointly won Cannes’ Best Actor prize back in 1996.
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Inspired by Huckleberry Finn, Southern Gothic fiction, and reminiscent of boys-on-the-run films by David Gordon Green (especially Undertow) and Jeff Nichols (especially Mud), Falcon is an adventure story where innocence and sin, play and danger often intersect.
It’s reminiscent of the Lee J. Cobb and Marlon Brando encounter in Elia Kazan’s “On The Waterfront” from 1954.
With its lonely, striving heart and love for eccentricity, The Peanut Butter Falcon reminded me of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, the 1971 cult classic that, in similar fashion, sneaks up on you and breaks your heart in all the right ways — and for all the right reasons.
We are used to seeing developmentally-able actors playing developmentally-disabled characters, like Sean Penn in I Am Sam , Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape , Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man , Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi in The Other Sister , and John Malkovich in Of Mice And Men , to name just a few.
It’s not a movie like I am Sam where the special needs characters are patronized to and treated like they have special magical powers.
Jon Voight in Coming Home , Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump , and Sean Penn in I Am Sam are just a few which come to mind.
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Forty years ago, this could have been the premise for a raucous comedy destined for drive-ins, in the vein of Smokey and the Bandit .
Beginning with just an inkling of Wes Anderson’s debut Bottle Rocket , as Zak (Gottsagen) attempts to escape a nursing home in Richmond, it’s thankfully a diversion as a much messier film in shape and attitude takes its place.