Lean on Pete (2018)
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Charley Thompson, a teenager living with his single father, gets a summer job working for horse trainer Del Montgomery. Bonding with an aging racehorse named Lean on Pete, Charley is horrified to learn he is bound for slaughter, and so he steals the horse, and the duo embark on an odyssey across the new American frontier.
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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.
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.