Lean on Pete (2018)

Film: Lean on Pete (2018)
Stars: Charlie Plummer, Travis Fimmel, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Steve Zahn
Director: Andrew Haigh
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

At this point, Andrew Haigh has entered the territory of "I'll see anything" when it comes to his pictures.  After Weekend, 45 Years, and Looking (all 100%, 5-star brilliant), his movies are monuments in my world, and he's earned the right to a blank ticket.  That's always a risky proposition for me to be in with a director, in part because then they occasionally get to put a stamp in my MoviePass I might otherwise not consider.  That's certainly true of Lean on Pete, Haigh's bold new film with a deeply conventional plot (a young man who finds purpose in caring for a horse), which defies its conventional genre trappings to be a thoughtful, nearly spiritual look at purpose, poverty, and life itself.

(Spoilers Ahead) As I said, the plot behind the film feels a bit routine, and almost plucked out of any Disney movie from the 90's that also featured a young man and an animal.  Charlie (Plummer) is a deeply-introverted, almost chronically shy & socially inept young man who lives with his kind but short-sighted father (Fimmel) in a trailer park in Oregon.  One day, while skipping school (Charlie seems to have dropped out when he moved away from Portland), he meets a man named Del (Buscemi) who runs horses at local fairs, oftentimes with the same jockey Bonnie (Sevigny).  Charlie develops a passion for helping to take care of the horses, particularly one named Lean on Pete whom Del is running into the ground.  After his father is killed by the husband of the woman he's sleeping with (like I said, short-sighted), Charlie finds out that the only other thing he loves, Pete, is being sold for meat by Del.  As a result, he heads off across-the-country in search of his aunt, who may or may not even still be alive, with Pete in tow in hopes of saving him.

This all sounds relatively cliched, and one could argue that it is, but it's never-handled that way, and oddly enough when he hits the open road is when we find the least hackneyed portion of the film.  Charlie comes across an America that is oftentimes neglected in cinema, and not in a #MAGA sort of way.  Instead, we see the effects of chronic poverty in his life, where a series of greasy diner food fill his nutritional sustenance, and where clutter is a result of necessity (from living in tiny houses or trailers), rather than out of bad housekeeping.  The art direction on the film is so careful, particularly late in the picture when Charlie spends the night with a pair of veterans in the middle-of-nowhere Colorado. i loved the way that they had a giant big-screen TV with a state-of-the-art video gaming system, but the rest of their existence was aged and dusty (their kitchen looked twenty years behind-the-times).  This sort of "we're prioritizing the stuff that distracts us from the bad" is almost never reflected in the movies, but it's so real to anyone who grew up in a small, rural town, and just one of many ways that Haigh finds truth on his journey with Charlie & Pete.

The film wouldn't work without a strong central performance, and here we see Haigh's ability to bring out the best in his lead actors in a similar way to what he found in Tom Cullen & Charlotte Rampling.  Charlie Plummer is masterfully-understated as a wayward soul, so bereft of purpose that the film's final moments are him realizing that he doesn't know what to do with his life, finally letting down his guard after so much tragedy.  Charlie the character is adrift, unable to know what he's looking for because he's incapable of thinking that far into the future.  He uses Pete, sturdy but also so-silent, as a listening board as he slowly confesses his dreams, with the audience realizing that there's little chance of even the most basic of advances available to this young man.  The world has given up on Charlie, with us seeing him as either destined for prison or a gutter or a series of soup kitchens, and yet he's only sixteen.  Haigh's views on poverty are stark-and real, indicting a system without ever mentioning it, and it wouldn't work without a beautiful central performance from Plummer.  Haigh's blank check remains more than deserved in my eyes because he continues to find the unexpected in what the human experience has to offer; with Weekend it was love, with 45 Years it was regret, and now with Lean on Pete it is purpose, and our search to find it in the darkest hours of our lives.