flick review

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot Is a Perfect Showcase for Joaquin Phoenix

Photograph: Scott Patrick Greenish/Courtesy of Sundance

The title of the wrenching habit drama Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot is a mouthful, but it certainly does evoke the life of the sardonic cartoonist and quadriplegic John Callahan. It's the caption of a console, spoken by a cowboy leading a posse who comes upon an overturned wheelchair in the desert. I'll allow you visualize that for a beat out. The image is both funny and grim. Merely Callahan's wheelchair falls over lots of times in the film — he's a hot dog tooling across busy intersections — and he somehow survives. Perchance he could even have out-crawled that posse.

The motion picture is primarily a celebration of the 12 Steps, which all but guarantees a groan out of most non-AA people. That's no knock on the steps or Alcoholics Anonymous, which has saved a lot of lives, but movies in which wayward addicts straighten out their lives (and souls, if you believe in such things) co-ordinate to a set regimen are more alike than unalike. In this case, happily, the director and screenwriter is Gus Van Sant, who makes movies that arrange to no recognizable templates, and Joaquin Phoenix (who plays Callahan) is one among the near thrillingly unpredictable film actors alive. Phoenix tends to go lost in his parts, which can lead him (along with his films) astray. Just when his high-wire emotional arc suits the movie, there are few who can touch him.

Van Sant (who worked from Callahan's memoir of the same title) cuts amongst several different timelines, which caused confusion for at to the lowest degree one viewer, simply pays off when the timelines merge at the very terminate. At present, the orange-haired Callahan is sitting in his motorized wheelchair telling his story before a large, rapt audience in a Portland auditorium. Now, he's telling a version of the same story in some kind of AA-related therapy grouping presided over by Jonah Hill looking like a fey Jesus. Now, there are flashbacks of his life at diverse junctures, including the last day he walked on 2 legs — which began while he was notwithstanding drunkard from the night earlier and ended in ending.

What makes Phoenix's performance especially exciting is that you're watching not just a character go from chaos to equanimity but an actor, as well. He looks unhinged when, in his ambulatory scenes, he weaves around, accosting an bonny young woman on the beach in Southern California, squatting behind a auto to finish off a canteen of tequila, and, of form, sliding behind the wheel. Phoenix lets Callahan's inner compass point due south, toward the abyss.

Immediately post-catastrophe, Callahan is nonetheless an unruly presence, visibly chafing confronting the limitations of his body (he has total use of at least one arm) and finding creative means to tip a bottle of vodka into his mouth. Equally Van Sant demonstrated in Drugstore Cowboy, getting make clean requires not just cocky-denial but a reinvention (and, in the curt term, a weakening) of one's entire persona. So Phoenix's Callahan commencement rails confronting his abandonment by his female parent at birth (he blames his addiction on others), lashes out at swain AA members, and so slowly begins to listen to voices other than his own. There'southward an AA slogan that goes, "Don't just sit down there. Do nothing." That's what Phoenix shows Callahan doing and that's what Phoenix does, likewise.

A film like Don't Worry … can ascension or fall on those AA grouping-therapy sessions, and these are the best I've seen. They're actually non formal AA events, though: They take place in the well-appointed firm of Jonah Colina's Donnie and are only for Donnie'southward sponsees — or "piglets," every bit he refers to them. Unlike regular AA meetings, these have "cross-talk" — i.due east., lots of interruptions and opportunities to vent, and Van Sant evidently encouraged a spontaneous flow. No less than Kim Gordon plays the ex-suburban housewife and Valium aficionado who tells a story about wandering her neighborhood buck naked. Udo Kier is doing … something from the planet of Udo Kier. A outset-fourth dimension actress, the 36-year-old musician Beth Ditto, all only takes over every bit the large and lovably extroverted member of the group.

Off to the side, drinking it all in, is Colina's Donnie, and Hill gives quite a performance. Early on, he seems and then intent on establishing his bona fides as a serious player (a recurrent problem) that it's hard to concentrate on his words. Merely gradually y'all can sense the intelligence that shaped his performance. Donnie is a rich male child, and so entitlement would be second nature. It'due south Donnie, not Hill, who'due south striving to project beatitude (he'due south addicted of quoting Lao Tzu), and his limp wrists are not Hill's way of signaling the character's homosexuality only an emblem of relaxation and openness. Donnie spouts a fair number of familiar Taoist/AA tropes and Higher Ability stuff that I tin can take or leave, just Loma makes you admire the guy's spirit.

Van Sant maintains an improvisatory spirit, too. He has elicited a stupendous score from Danny Elfman that's largely bebop only with alternately eerie and comforting orchestral noodling. Maybe considering the moving-picture show is set in the '70s and '80s, Van Sant and his dynamic cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt employ a period device — a zoom lens — to jump closer to Phoenix at moments of revelation. They zoom in on the cartoons that Callahan draws — with tenuous dexterity but remarkable concentration — when the recovered alcoholic finds his truthful calling. And sometimes Van Sant even animates those cartoons. (NB: Callahan had as many haters equally admirers. In his work, he depicts feminists as overbearing and lesbians as terrifying. Only he found his ain nature terrifying, as well. He was a bad boy to the end.)

I'm non sure what the hell Rooney Mara is doing as a glassy blonde Swedish concrete therapist turned flight attendant — I hoped she'd turn out to be a figment of Callahan'south imagination (he has a few) but no such luck. Everyone else is wonderful, from the pinnacle of the cast list to the bottom. Jack Black is Dexter, the wild-homo alcoholic who led Callahan off the precipice. He's predictably Jack Black–ish (gonzo) in his first sequence. His 2nd, years later, when Callahan tracks him down every bit part of the 9th step, is revelatory.

In a Q&A afterwards the Sundance earth premiere, Van Sant was modest and generous. Beth Ditto didn't want to surrender the microphone: She idea perchance she'd never act in a moving-picture show again. (A number of audition members called out, "Yeah! You will!") Phoenix was a no-show, prompting Loma to text him from the phase. I kind of liked that he blew it off. I didn't want my retentiveness of his brilliance onscreen to exist dimmed by his trademark coy monosyllables and exhibitionistic discomfort in the spotlight.

Don't Worry He Won't Get Far on Foot Is A+ Joaquin Phoenix