Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz (2019)
The Peanut Butter Falcon, showing at the London Film Festival immediately before its UK-wide release, has two distinctive features. The first is an appealing, intriguing title. The second, more important, is that the main character is a young man with Down’s syndrome, played by an actor who has the same condition. In most other respects, this is a formulaic drama-comedy – sentimental and predictable, though well acted and likeable too. Twenty-two-year-old Zak (Zack Gottsagen), who has special needs but no family, is in care in North Carolina – in, of all places, a retirement home. He keeps trying to escape; his sensitive but exasperated carer Eleanor (Dakota Johnson) labels him a ‘flight risk’. One night, with the help of his wily geriatric roommate Carl (Bruce Dern), Zak takes off, into the great outdoors.
Although he’s taken a shine to Zak, one thing about him Carl won’t miss. The old man is obliged to spend a fair amount of every day watching an antique VHS tape that Zak insists on playing repeatedly. It promotes the exploits of a pro wrestler known as the Salt Water Redneck and his wrestling school in the North Carolina town of Ayden. Zak has his heart set on becoming a wrestler too. When he escapes from the retirement home, his destination is the school in Ayden but he hasn’t any idea how to get there. Wearing just his underpants and soon bewildered, he takes refuge on a fishing boat moored beside a lake. He’s startled to find the boat suddenly in motion. It’s been stolen by Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), a local man who also needs to make a getaway.
Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz have introduced Tyler in parallel to Zak but the two are destined to be partners on the journey, geographical and emotional, that The Peanut Butter Falcon describes. We first meet Tyler in an altercation at a crab shack with two other locals, Duncan (John Hawkes) and Ratboy (Yelawolf). They won’t let Tyler sell his crabs because he hasn’t a licence for catching them. In retaliation, he sets fire to $12,000 worth of equipment on the docks and flees on the boat Zak’s hiding on. In his first, brief conversation with Zak, Tyler learns little more than that the young man can’t swim. Tyler has decided to quit North Carolina and head for Florida. Once they reach the other side of the lake, he attempts to leave Zak behind but soon thinks again. He retraces his steps to see Zak on a high platform and in peril. A teenage boy, yelling ‘retard’ repeatedly, forces him to jump down into the lake.
Although he rescues Zak, Tyler spends a while after that grumbling at him – standard practice for a film character on the move, but with an unexpected, alien companion who’s liable to hinder progress. Yet the older man, without saying so, soon feels not just a responsibility to protect Zak but also kinship with another runaway. Eleanor, meanwhile, has been dispatched by her unpleasant boss, Glen (Lee Spencer), to track the fugitive down. She bumps into Tyler in a convenience store, where he’s buying provisions for himself and Zak. Tyler tries and fails to chat her up. When Eleanor produces a photograph of Zak, Tyler denies having seen him. As they continue on their journey to Florida via Ayden, Tyler is struck by Zak’s fierce, if clueless, determination to get to where he wants to be – and by the youngster’s unusual bodily strength. He teaches Zak how to swim (shades of Moonlight) and fire a gun, and improvises a physical training programme for him.
When he tells Tyler about his wrestling hero and ambitions, Zak admits that he can’t himself become a hero because of his Down’s syndrome. It’s a resonant moment: you can’t help wondering if Zack Gottsagen is also speaking for himself and the limited opportunities available to him as an actor. I didn’t know this beforehand but the film was developed, according to Wikipedia, after ‘Nilson and Schwartz first met Zack Gottsagen at a camp for disabled actors around 2011 in Venice, California, and he expressed interest in them making a film with him’. The writer-directors took Gottsagen’s ‘own desire to be an actor and change[d] it into a quest to become a wrestler’. In the light of ‘shooting a $20,000 proof-of-concept video, the duo received funding for a feature starring Gottsagen’.
There’s no getting away from this dimension of The Peanut Butter Falcon – or from how unlikely it is that Zack Gottsagen’s appearance in what is now a critically and commercially successful film will be the breakthrough it might have been for a non-disabled actor. Gottsagen is actually thirty-four (older than either Shia LaBeouf or Dakota Johnson). His IMDb credits include a short made in 2012 and a feature (Ready to Ride: A Musical Homecoming), starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard and which is now in post-production. Even so, Gottsagen’s screen opportunities will inevitably be few. As you watch The Peanut Butter Falcon, you do get a more real understanding of why there are growing calls for disabled characters always to be played by appropriately disabled actors – who will certainly never get to play people without their disability.
Zack Gottsagen may, to a large extent, be expressing himself rather than creating a character but he can time and point a line, and he produces some comically singular sounds when Zak is exerting himself physically and emotionally. Gottsagen may also have helped Shia LaBeouf give a dynamic and generous performance – the best I’ve seen from him. Tyler has a criminal record and caused the death of his elder brother in a car crash (drunk driving, Tyler fell asleep at the wheel). LaBeouf shows very well how Tyler’s empathy with Zak – someone who, like himself, is up against it – grows into altruism. When Eleanor discovers the pair’s camp, she makes unavailing attempts to get Zak to return with her immediately to the retirement home. Tyler persuades her to accompany them to Ayden instead. She agrees, provided they return to the home once Zak has visited Salt Water Redneck’s wrestling school. Soon after making that condition, she goes native. It’s a mechanical transition; to Dakota Johnson’s credit, it doesn’t feel like a false one. Nuanced from the start, Johnson always suggests a potential in Eleanor to change her mind and ways. Another prescribed element of the script is that, in due course, she and Tyler fall in love. Johnson and LaBeouf make that work too.
The episodic narrative has echoes of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Crossing a river, Tyler and Zak narrowly escape being struck by a passenger boat. They stumble across an eccentric old blind man (Wayne Dehart) – a zealous Christian who baptises them both and gives them what they need to build a raft. Throughout their journey around the Outer Banks of North Carolina, they’re pursued by Duncan and Ratbag, hellbent on getting revenge for Tyler’s arson. In these cases too, Nilson and Schwartz are well served by their actors – especially John Hawkes. Although Duncan and Ratbag are baddies in the simple moral scheme of the piece, Hawkes conveys, as well as wiry aggression, a raw neediness in Duncan.
Tyler eventually tracks down Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church), although he’s long retired and the school has closed down. This is one of the best parts of the film – thanks not least to Thomas Haden Church’s strong and funny presence. (Bruce Dern has similar qualities in the opening scenes.) It’s beyond Zak’s comprehension that what he saw on the video isn’t happening here and now. Salt Water, real name Clint, is moved by what Tyler tells him to set up a wrestling bout for Zak – the climax to the story and to the pursuit of Tyler by Duncan and Ratbag. The Peanut Butter Falcon finally reduces to a simplistic happy ending as Eleanor, Zak and Tyler drive into Florida together. Still, the misfits’ friendship has occasionally brought to mind Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy – so it’s a relief to see both Zak and Tyler reach Florida alive. Eleanor has finally parted company with the retirement home, the outrageous Glen having proposed that, rather than bring Zak back there, she place him in a care facility for drug addicts and prostitutes. I’m assuming the film isn’t inventing how shockingly random and thoughtless placements in the American care system can be.
As will be clear, Nilson’s and Schwartz’s screenplay is on the primitive side but they tell an entertaining story and, with the help of their DP Nigel Bluck, make good use of the landscape, conjuring up a sense of both its liberating and threatening aspects. The script’s sketchiness is a plus in one sense: it avoids an overworking of either Tyler’s or Eleanor’s backstory. There are just a couple of flashbacks to Tyler and his brother (Jon Bernthal) to illustrate their closeness and make clear how the latter died. There’s no explanation at all of how Eleanor became such a young widow. A little bluegrass music goes a long way with me and the soundtrack contains more than a little, but that’s hardly a criticism. It turns out the film is named for Zak’s wrestling persona, inspired by his regular diet during the journey. When he went shopping in the convenience store, a jar of peanut butter was all that Tyler could afford.
11 October 2019
