Gus Van Sant (2018)
Danny Elfman has written the music for all but one of Gus Van Sant’s films since Milk (2008) but, in the first part of his latest, the director and the composer are at odds with each other. Van Sant, who also wrote the screenplay for Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, looks to be trying to subvert conventions of the disability biopic. He’s hardly the first to do this: My Left Foot (1989) went a long way to breaking the mould; The Sessions (2012) is a more recent honourable exception to the usual approach. But let that pass … Elfman’s twinkling, mildly hopeful score is under the impression this is a standard-issue triumph-over-adversity story and keeps nudging Van Sant in that direction. He eventually succumbs but the capitulation is no great loss. Even when it meant to be more distinctive, the film was weak.
The title is taken from one of the best-known cartoons of the protagonist John Callahan. The drawing shows a posse of cowboys in the desert. They’re contemplating an empty wheelchair; the reassuring words of one of the posse are the cartoon’s caption. A wheelchair is central to the life story of Callahan (1951-2010) who, at the age of twenty-one, was in a car accident that left him quadriplegic. At the time, he was a slacker, devoting most of his time to drinking in Long Beach, Southern California. The accident occurred following a bar crawl he’d been on with another man, who was driving Callahan’s car. After becoming paralysed, his alcohol problems got worse; after extensive rehabilitation, Callahan regained some use of his upper body. Holding a pen between his hands, he discovered a talent for cartoons. The visual style was rudimentary and the verbal humour black. The effect was regularly sacrilegious in relation to religion, politically incorrect in relation to sex and disability. Callahan, who’d now made his home in Portland, Oregon, also spent plenty of time at Alcoholics Anonymous: at the age of twenty-seven, he gave up drink. His reliably controversial drawings appeared in a wide variety of publications and, for the rest of his life, in each issue of the Willamette Week, Portland’s alternative newspaper.
Van Sant inserts examples of Callahan’s work into the film. They supply most of its amusing moments and serve as some kind of tribute to its subject. Hard work, though, to find other things to recommend Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Splintering the material into a non-chronological sequence of events is – as often with this technique – really just a means of fancying up a narrative the filmmaker fears will look weak if merely linear. In this case, the result is still underpowered. A succession of AA group sessions, for example, are barely dramatised. Van Sant also uses occasional references to items in the Twelve Steps programme. At first, this seems an attempt to firm up the listless narrative. By the closing stages, the movie comes over as primarily an endorsement of AA therapy – which is fair enough but sits oddly with the lethargic anarchy of the first half. As Danny Elfman has insisted, John Callahan’s biography turns into something more familiar. The scenes illustrating his unresolved, screwed-up feelings about the biological mother who gave him up for adoption, although they’re laced with wry humour, still amount to a standard psychological explanation. There’s even a moment when the hero has a vision of his mother, in which she assures him, ‘You’re a good person, John’.
The film’s inertia is aligned with, and reinforced by, Joaquin Phoenix’s presence in the lead role. His appearance – thanks in no small part to a ginger wig that’s unmistakably a ginger wig – is weird and confusing. He evidently lost weight for the flashbacks to John Callahan’s hedonistic, able-bodied youth but is heavier in all the other scenes. Phoenix is actually forty-four now. The upshot of all this is that you get the impression (a) that Callahan was much older than twenty-one when he had his life-changing accident and (b) that the period of his rehabilitation was well in advance of six years. The actor’s weary tone and speech rhythms sap his character’s anger (and have a soporific effect on the viewer). For the most part, Phoenix is dynamic only when Callahan’s wheelchair is careering out of control. As the AIDS-afflicted leader of the AA group, Jonah Hill gives a more alert and expressive performance.
Rooney Mara blooms in the role of a physical therapy nurse both angelic and carnal – Phoenix livens up a little in their scenes together. This is the second time in recent months these two have paired up, after Jesus and the title character in Mary Magdalene! Which reminds me: one of the interesting things about watching Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot at the Institute of Contemporary Arts was being made to realise that the film, although set in the recent past, is definitely a period piece. John Callahan’s work may have scandalised in the last decades of the last century; some of his one-liners are even more outrageous now. Two of the cartoons that Gus Van Sant includes illustrate this nicely. One shows Christ on the cross with a caption ‘TGIF’; the other, two nervous-looking men on a construction site that bears the sign ‘Warning: this area patrolled by lesbians’. The crucifixion joke was received with much laughter at the ICA. The construction site joke met with stony silence. It’s true the ‘TGIF’ gag is the better one but that’s not enough to explain the different reactions.
1 November 2018
