“Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on,” goes the chorus of the Bill Withers song that the title of Andrew Haigh‘s new movie inevitably recalls. Gird that impression with the fact that “Lean on Pete” is the name of a racehorse, and the film details a coming of age story, and you probably already think you know what you’re getting. But Haigh will, gently and with downbeat, sad-eyed wisdom, relieve you of those preconceptions one by one. This is as much a story of hopeful, redemptive connection between man and animal as his masterpiece, “45 Years,” was an advertisement for the joys of decades-long marriage. It may be loosely described as a boy-and-his-horse movie, but here nobody is anybody’s really. Lean on Pete is never Charley’s horse, and not just because he’s stolen.
The 15-year-old Charley is played by Charlie Plummer, in a star-making turn that seems semi-miraculously to oscillate between childhood and adulthood. He can look like a young man at one moment, as he does when we meet him on his morning run in a dingy Portland suburb, and then, almost by a subtle trick of light, he has the sullen sweetness of a child again. Charley and his loving but feckless buddy-father (Travis Fimmel) have not been here long, as a few quick details picked out by Haigh’s sensitive adaptation of Willy Vlautin‘s celebrated novel establish: a trophy is casually removed from still-packed box; Charley seeks permission to get a glass of water from his own sink and asks his dad if he’s noticed the racetrack down the road.
He is running alongside the track when he encounters unscrupulous, downwardly mobile horse trainer Del (Steve Buscemi, whose nasal tones shouting “motherfucking cocksucker fuck!” at a flat tire are unmistakable even when he’s offscreen). The mercurial Del hires Charley, who quickly takes to the ropes of mucking out stables and hitching trailers, and forms a special attachment to a 5-year-old chestnut quarter horse called Lean On Pete. This attachment is expressly against the hard-won advice of jockey Bonnie, played by an excellent Chloe Sevigny, who delivers the hell out of world-weary, saddle-sore lines like, “I was tired of talking to you 15 minutes after I met you, 20 years ago.”
Charley’s tentative stability is whipped away by his father’s sudden death. And with Lean On Pete, described by Del as “a piece of shit,” on a losing streak, and probably bound for a Mexican slaughterhouse, Charley steals the horse, truck and trailer and sets out for Wyoming to find the beloved aunt from whom his dad had become estranged after a bitter custody fight.
Though shot with a kind of glowy restraint by DP Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, and marked by Haigh’s facility for achieving resonance through reserve, until this point the narrative has been familiar enough, and the stage would seem to be set for the kind of learning-curve American odyssey in which time-honored rite-of-passage lessons about Friendship, Loyalty and Responsibility are learned. But this is that story with all the sentimentality precision-syringed out, and what’s left is an increasingly hard-edged, occasionally harrowing journey through hardship and loss, toward near-destitution.
It’s saved from all-out depressiveness by Haigh’s compassion, which cradles the characters within their often desperate situations. This is especially true of Charley, whose mutable face forms the focus of almost every scene, whether small in the wide frame of a scrubbily beautiful sunset landscape, or in searching close-up mirror shots as though he’s checking to see if any vestiges of his old, unformed sweetness remain. No matter how harsh the circumstances — and they get pretty harsh in this marginalized substratum of American existence that is still all payphones, dusty baseball caps and the kind but tired diner waitresses of every Tom Waits song — Haigh’s film respects the people living through them enough not to sugar-coat their reality. His father’s new girlfriend, cooking eggs for breakfast; a couple of young army vets in the desert; a homeless guy (Steve Zahn) whose generosity comes at a price; the overweight young woman who looks after her verbally abusive grandfather because she “has nowhere else to go” — all these people are peripheral to the story, but vividly real for the brief moment their lives intersect with Charley’s.
It’s particularly refreshing, for those of us for whom the term “horse movie” summons a bit of a shudder, that “Lean On Pete” almost entirely refutes the idea of the mystical, mutually redemptive soul-mate-style connection between human and equine. “I used to like horses once,” says Del, but that time has long passed, and though Charley talks to Pete on their cross-state trek, his love for the horse is not going to save either one of them.
In fact, the tenderly observed, but sad, unlucky series of events that mark Charley’s passage into adulthood prove that very fact: not only can you not save anyone, no one can save you, because life is far more complicated and lonely than a series of rescues. The low-key, muted but scrupulously honest “Lean on Pete” comes to the slightly brokenhearted conclusion that to grow up is to find that there are things you can’t fix and can’t undo — you cannot un-hit a man, un-leave a child or un-steal a racehorse — and that the best you can hope for from anyone, as Bill Withers might croon, is that you get to lean on them a moment. [B+]
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