David Gordon Green (2013)
Joe is an ex-con, who runs some kind of deforestation business in the backwoods of Texas. Now pushing fifty, he regularly uses prostitutes but his only constant domestic companion is his dog. Gary is a local teenager, anxious to start earning money to get himself, his mother and his sister distance and protection from a brutal alcoholic paterfamilias. Joe gives Gary work and finds in the boy the son he never had. For Gary, Joe is a father figure much preferable to the real one in his life. The source material for Joe is a 1991 ‘grit lit’ novel of the same name by Larry Brown; the screenplay is by Gary Hawkins. David Gordon Green treats the two main characters sympathetically, not to say sentimentally, as they struggle determinedly against adversity. Their main human opposition, in the form of Gary’s father Wade and another nasty called Willie, who has a long-held grudge against Joe, have presumably faced similar social disadvantages but they are presented as utterly and irredeemably malignant. The women in the film are entirely one-dimensional. This is true not just of the standard-issue sex workers but also of Gary’s zonked-out mother and nearly catatonic sister. (Their conditions are caused, as I understood it, by drink and drugs in the case of the mother and sexual abuse, at the hands of their father, in the case of the daughter.)
Joe is relentlessly grim and often garishly violent: the pounding, glum music by Jeff McIlwain and David Wingo, the gloomy lighting by Tim Orr – both are just what you’d expect. The film is stupefying (in the dulling sense of the word) but eventually infuriating too. It’s outrageous that, after all the darkness and physical abuse, you’re meant to be moved by the soggy climax. Joe dies (and get rids of the baddies) so that Gary can live, and enjoy a better life than Joe has had. The morning after his self-sacrificing death, the sun is shining and birds are flying over the woodlands which, until now, have seen a lot of mayhem but few of the beauties of nature and very little good weather. David Gordon Green’s combination of an antique moral scheme and par-for-the-course contemporary screen violence is contemptibly unpleasant. Even the potentially ennobling quality of Joe’s love for his dog is undermined by a sequence in which he gets the animal to fight to the death with the ‘asshole’ dog at the brothel. Joe’s dog wins: he’s shown licking his bloodstained chops as the corpse of his vanquished rival lies at the back of the frame.
I didn’t know before seeing Joe that it had acquired controversy following the death last year of one of the key cast members, Gary Poulter, who plays the vicious Wade. According to the Wikipedia article:
‘Gary Poulter was found dead in a shallow body of water in September 2013 before the film was ever released. Poulter, who played an alcoholic father in the film, was a real-life homeless man, who suffered from alcoholism and was already deeply ill. … Producers worried casting Poulter in the film would be a risk, with Poulter’s lack of sobriety, however, Green stayed committed to allowing him to be in the film. …’
Whatever the ethics of Green’s ‘commitment’ to casting Poulter, the director’s decision to use a mixture of professionals and non-professionals makes for an unsatisfying confusion of acting styles. The non-professionals are real enough – in the sense that you can tell they’re not experienced actors: the ‘reality’ is partly achieved by rough and ready line readings, and by Green’s camera observing these people rather than their engaging with the camera. (To be fair to Gary Poulter, it’s relatively harder to spot him as a non-professional.) Experienced professionals like Ronnie Gene Blevins, as Willie, and Adriene Mishler, as a prostitute, are obvious in a different, worse way. The presence of Tye Sheridan as Gary and, especially, of Nicolas Cage as Joe is incongruous in this company. Sheridan doesn’t have a lot of range but his freshness of face is a relief among the grizzled mugs, scowling or leering, that dominate proceedings. Cage’s performance has been praised but he’s not expressive – you’re conscious mainly of an actor working hard to be disciplined. The characterisation is lifeless. Nicolas Cage seems to be doing penance here for all the derided films he’s chosen to make since the long-ago last time his acting was admired (on that occasion deservedly) in Adaptation.
27 July 2014
