By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Lean
on Pete and The Rider
Two movies, two horses, two young males…..
Lean on
Pete
Sometimes an
actor is the movie. Like Charlie Plummer in Lean on Pete. Plummer, who turns 19 this month, plays Charley Thompson,
15. He was another Thompson on TV’s Boardwalk
Empire, and movingly played the kidnapped Getty grandson in All the Money in the World (he’s evidently
unrelated to famous Christopher, who was the miserly grandfather). As Charley, Plummer
achieves perhaps the finest male adolescent acting since Tye Sheridan as Ellis
in 2015’s Mud.
Charley is a stripling solo child whose life is being
stripped to the bone. His mother fled early. Father (Travis Finnel) is a jolly
drunk with angry impulses. New to a rough part of Portland (Oregon), the lad is
friendless but finds an old race track. His face elates when horses whip past
him. Charley becomes stable boy to Del (Boardwalk
Empire’s Steve Buscemi), a trainer, owner and gambler. Del, pawn in the
sport of kings, enters in Buscemi style with a whip-crack of profanity. Cynical
(“I used to like horses, too, you know”), Del expects his Quarter horses to win
stakes or go “to Mexico” (death). But he decently finds work for Charley, feeds
the rake-lean teen’s robust appetite, intros him to jockey Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny). A kind but
tough survivor, she warns him against bonding with the equines. Lonely, soon
orphaned, Charley bonds to Pete, a gentle stallion.
British director Andrew Haigh, adapting Willy
Vlautin’s acclaimed novel, has not made a Disney boy-and-horse saga (don’t take the kids). There is hard road
and harsh time as, horse in hand, Charley searches for a distant aunt. Steve
Zahn is memorably miserable as a booze wreck, the story’s authentic grain
reminded me of Sam Peckinpah’s Junior
Bonner, and the western landscape vision is acute. But the movie belongs to
Plummer. His hungry wistfulness has a faint drag line in his voice, which makes
shyness yearningly expressive. He is an unforgettable identity seeker. Among good
movies about troubled boy-men finding the first leverage on maturity (Boys Town, The Yearling, The 400 Blows, East
of Eden, Aparajito, Kes, The Last Picture Show, Fresh, Zebrahead, King of the
Hill, Hope and Glory, The Kid With a Bike, Mud, Lion, Call Me by Your Name),
Lean on Pete finds its place, topped by Charlie Plummer.
The Rider
“Any real horse lover will tell you, they’d rather be
a friend with most horses than most people.” So the great Westerns director and
horseman Budd Boetticher told me, in the 1990s. Brady Blackburn might agree. In
The Rider his best friends are horses
and rodeo cowboys, the latter worried after rising star Brady falls off his rodeo
bronco, a hoof crunching his head. Now he’s got a mean scar above a metal skull
plate, iffy reflexes and a hand that can suddenly tighten like a vise. He’s
told to stay away from rodeo riding, bucking horses and the raw-nerved life he loved
– or hang his spurs in heaven.
Director Chloé Zhao has made a life-true tribute to
Dakota cowboys, their bodies and gear, their young machismo and sheepish
courtesy, their craze for tough animals, adrenaline and danger. It’s halfway to
documentary. Brady Jantreau, who had this terrible injury, plays Brady
Blackburn, and other Jantreaus incarnate various Blackburns. One is autistic
sister Lilly, who acts the loving junior sibling with such sparky authenticity she
becomes the film’s mascot, like young Sam Bottoms in The Last Picture Show (with her frontier spunk, she’s funnier).
Lane Scott, a buckaroo pal terribly damaged, plays himself. Hospital visits show
Brady’s devotion, and signal the possible fate that could also afflict him. His
brief tears were, to me, more moving than all of Brokeback Mountain.
It’s less the sport than the animals that enthrall Brady.
The scenes of him taming and training a risky horse would surely win the
approval of horse “whisperer” Buck Brannaman (see Buck). The ending is very satisfying, not just an easy rouser. Yes,
Brady Jantreau is basically performing himself, but Zhao (also scripting) directed
him with the calm, gentle insight that Brady brings to his animals. In settings
of rustic beauty and terse but probing honesty, her film rides its range with cowboy
instincts.
SALAD:
A List
Movies
Featuring Boys With Horses:
The Black Stallion, Casey’s Shadow, The
Horse Boy, Lean on Pete, The Man From Snowy River, The Red Pony, The Rider, Running
Free, The Water Horse, White Mane.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Much
of the fun in Citizen Kane, before its
return to the dark tonality of its opening, comes from the jolly complicity of newcomers,
pulling off an inside game of insurgent creativity: “Most were just happy to be
there. Is it any wonder that the script had scenes that might be mirror images
of Welles and his people taking over RKO as Kane and his fellows invaded
newspapers? Of course (writer Herman) Mankiewicz could not have predicted that.
But Welles must have felt the resemblance, and gone with it, thrilled in the
discovery of self.” (Quote from David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Pertinent
to Orson Welles’s The Trial, “Kafka
made the letter K a modern culture node, although his diary declared the letter
‘offensive, almost nauseating.’ To scholar James Naremore, the letter is ‘part
of Welles’s signature – from Kurtz (Heart
of Darkness) to Kane (Citizen Kane)
to Kellar (The Stranger) he was
enamored of Kafka’s initial K.’ And it defines my personal, Wellesian K-trio: Kane, Arkadin (Mr. Arkadin),
Joseph K (The Trial). Let not call it KKK." (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Kelly
Reno rides his wonderful horse on the beach in The Black Stallion (United Artists, 1979; director Carroll Ballard;
cinematographer Caleb Deschanel).
For
previous Noshes, scroll below.
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