Andrew Haigh (2017)

The opening sequences of Lean on Pete are economically informative about the circumstances of Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer), the teenage protagonist.  In a virtually unfurnished room, Charley takes from one of a jumble of cardboard boxes two school sporting trophies and puts them on the windowsill.  He goes out running, past a hypermarket and other functional buildings, on to Portland Downs racetrack[1].  He returns home for a breakfast cooked by Lynn (Amy Seimetz), the current girlfriend of Charley’s single father Ray (Travis Fimmel).  The boy’s T-shirt bears the name of a high school in Spokane.  We soon learn that Charley and his father moved from Washington because Oregon was where Ray could get a job.  (We learn too this isn’t the pair’s first such move although I was never clear about Ray’s line of work.)  We can tell from the way Charley looks at his surroundings that they’re still new to him.  The same goes for the British writer-director, Andrew Haigh.  Lean on Pete, his fourth cinema feature, is the first one set in America rather than England.

In 45 Years (2015), Haigh enlarged the physical setting as well as the narrative scope of the source material, David Constantine’s In Another Country.  Constantine’s short story is set on a housing estate in Wales, 45 Years in the more open spaces of rural Norfolk.   Lean on Pete, which Haigh has adapted from a 2010 novel of the same name by Willy Vlautin, moves the geographical scale up a few notches more – especially during the journey at the heart of the film, when Charley travels on foot in the direction of Wyoming, in the company of the title character, a five-year-old chestnut racehorse.  Haigh and his cinematographer Magnus Joenck create eloquent contrasts between the sometimes bewildering scale of the great outdoors and the unlovely interiors – stable stalls, diners, convenience stores – that punctuate the story.

Fifteen-year-old Charley evidently hasn’t yet been placed in school in Portland.  He gets work with Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), a small-time trainer whose half-dozen quarter-horses are stabled near the racetrack.  (Is Charley meant to have a prior liking for horses?  He wanders independently into the Portland Downs complex and seems taken with the racing photographs there but he doesn’t seek Del out:  the trainer stops Charley, during one of his regular runs, to ask if the boy can help fix a wheel on a horsebox.)   After Del has taken him on, Charley looks after Lean on Pete – Pete for short – and becomes attached to him, in spite of warnings from Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), a jockey who sometimes rides for Del, that that is just what you shouldn’t do.  This attachment to the horse intensifies when Ray, attacked by Lynn’s estranged but jealous husband, dies of complications arising from his injuries.   While Charley leans on Pete emotionally, his boss is far from sentimental about the animals in his charge.  On his first meeting with Charley, Del introduces Pete as a ‘piece of shit’.  When it fails to win a claiming race, Charley knows what the horse’s fate will be:  Del will sell it across the Mexican border and it’ll soon be horsemeat.  Charley makes a getaway in Del’s horsebox with Lean on Pete in the back.  Once the boy runs out of money for petrol, Shanks’s pony is the only means of moving forward.

This is not a traditional boy-and-horse or The Incredible Journey-type tale, heading for an inevitable happy ending by way of tribulations en route.  The tribulations dominate here and the futility of the trek with the horse is particularly distressing.  Charley, who doesn’t remember his mother, has enjoyed happy times with his aunt Margy in Rock Springs, Wyoming but she and his father fell out some time ago, and Charley doesn’t have her up-to-date contact details.   It seems impossibly long odds against the walk to Rock Springs paying off – even if Charley finds Margy, she’s unlikely to take Pete in as a household pet.  This problem is solved unhappily when, one night, Pete gets loose, is spooked by the noise of motorbike engines, runs into the path of an oncoming car and is killed.  Things don’t look up once Charley can progress unencumbered.  Exhausted and malnourished, he wanders into a small town and a homeless mission.  There he meets Silver (Steve Zahn), a traveller who offers Charley lodging in his trailer.  Things soon go wrong when the diligent Charley finds a temporary job and gets paid for it, and Silver’s violent alcoholic side comes out.

It’s a real strength of the film that Andrew Haigh takes care to humanise everyone in the story and repeatedly succeeds without falsity.  Ray Thompson is feckless – more a zany (younger) brother than a parent – but he loves his son.  Del Montgomery is a father figure of sorts, though he’s hard-bitten and shady too.  During his cross-state odyssey, Charley, famished and broke, has a meal in a diner.  He tries to leave with the takeaway he also ordered and without paying for anything.  The manager (Jason Rouse) stops him and calls the police but has a dilemma: a big party is about to arrive at the diner and the manager hasn’t time to devote to the boy.  The waitress (Julia Prud’homme) who served Charley persuades the manager to let him go.  The mixture of compassion and practical considerations that brings this about is entirely persuasive.  The waitress’s kind heart recalls Ray’s earlier advice to his son that all the best women in this world have waited tables at some time or another – a theory with the clang of dim chauvinist garbage when Ray voices it, but touching now.

Charley has to break the law repeatedly in order to survive.  His episodic journey includes encounters with various people left behind in present-day America – as well as Silver, a couple of war veterans (Lewis Pullman and Justin Rain) with whom Charley and Pete briefly stay.  Each episode is individually well done but Lean on Pete is short on novel insights and, though Charlie Plummer is very good in the lead, the hero’s character doesn’t develop much:  things happen to him and he keeps going.  A further difficulty builds up pari passu with the increasing grimness of the narrative.  The film’s relatively happy ending is a great relief.  Charley, who’s never known a mother, eventually finds sympathetic, solitary Margy (Alison Elliott).  She’s more than happy to take him in and will see too that he gets back into high school.  Charley’s story becomes so credibly grim, however, that it’s unconvincing how straightforwardly he locates Margy:  a long-distance phone call to someone who once worked with her tells Charley all he needs to know.  Margy got married (not for long, it transpires) and moved from Rock Springs to Laramie, where she now has a job in the public library.  After using violent force to retrieve from Silver the wages he earned, Charley gets a bus to Laramie, walks into the library and there Margy is.

Willy Vlautin’s novel is told by Charley in the first person.  Andrew Haigh avoids the easy way out of a voiceover though there are times when you think that might tell us more about Charley’s feelings.   As it is, he’s verbally communicative only to Pete, as they walk through open country.  This reminiscent monologue, so different from anything else, sticks out as artificial.  (In a first-person narrative, it might well sound more natural – and as if Charley were talking almost to himself.)  Charlie Plummer reads it well, nevertheless, and this eighteen-year-old, one of the few good things in All the Money in the World, is a talent.  In Lean on Pete (for which he won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor/Actress at the 2017 Venice Film Festival), Plummer carries the story with a minimum of overt histrionics.   We believe this teenager has long got used to keeping his emotions in check.  We also really care what happens to him.  At the end of the film, immediately after Charley has broken down weeping on Margy’s shoulder, Haigh cuts to show him back out running and, in a close-up, quietly ready to face the future.  This contrast between the child and the young man is obvious enough yet the juxtaposition of the two moments reminds you how skilfully Charlie Plummer has, throughout, combined the waif and precocious survivor aspects of Charley.  The supporting cast is strong, though Haigh’s casting of Chloë Sevigny is a bit too imaginative.  It was a good idea, in theory, to resist presenting a ‘typical’ jockey.  In practice, Sevigny doesn’t convince, temperamentally or physically.

29 April 2018

[1] Portland, Oregon’s racetrack is actually Portland Meadows.