Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot
FILM REVIEW
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot The awkwardly titled Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot — it’s also the caption to a cartoon that shows an empty wheelchair surveyed by an old-west sheriff — marks the first tentative dip into narrative waters by director Gus Van Sant since his suicide-themed parable The Sea of Trees was savaged at the 2015 Cannes film festival. (I was there, and can report that it was a lovely, moving film and might have been a Palme d’Or contender, if only absolutely everyone else hadn’t disagreed with me.)
Don’t Worry tells the story of John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix), who led an unremarkable life until a drunk-driving accident when he was 21 left him a paraplegic. (He was actually a drunk passenger, but the driver was drunk too.) He subsequently sobered up and became a cartoonist; the exact order is a little hazy in the film, which jumps around a lot. His work lampooned the disabled, race, sexual orientation and more, and while he was white and straight, he felt the wheelchair gave him a licence to poke fun.
It’s a shame Van Sant didn’t get to make this movie back in the ‘90s with Robin Williams as originally planned. The comic would have brought a manic energy to the role, and could have turned the scene where Callahan tries to open a bottle of wine with his teeth into a struggle worthy of Hemingway. He also could have done wonders as both drunk and sober Callahan. Phoenix plays a great drunk (see Inherent Vice) but looks a little lost when dry, and his contented smile flirts with parody.
He’s otherwise excellent, however, as are the scenes of him whizzing around Portland in his electric wheelchair — honestly, was there no governor to keep that thing sub-sonic? Van Sant, one of a trio of writers adapting Callahan’s 1989 autobiography for the film, isn’t much interested in the indignities of being a paraplegic in the ‘70s — to be fair, the fashions, hairstyles and alcoholism are cross enough to bear.
Callahan passed away in 2010 at the age of 59, which gives the film a tidy closure it would otherwise lack. But even at that, the screenplay struggles to connect several disparate threads in his life. Rooney Mara plays his girlfriend, Annu, who wafts into the film as a hospital visitor shortly after his accident, then bumps into him again years later; love at second sight, I guess.
Vastly more screen time goes to Donnie (Jonah Hill), his AA sponsor, who runs a quasi-religious therapy offshoot for his “piglets,” as he fondly calls his fellow addicts. And we briefly meet Tim (Tony Greenhand), Callahan’s long-suffering support worker. There are rejection letters, acceptance letters, and a weird scene where Callahan risks losing his benefits because he’s too gainfully employed.
It’s merely the aspects of a life, but somehow it all feels too much and too messy in the telling. (A jazzy, sax-heavy score by Danny Elfman is oddly appropriate to the untidy structure.) Yet another plot strand, about the adopted Callahan’s quest to find his birth mother, doesn’t quite fit the mix, and we get several repetitions of his joke about the three things he knows about her.
But his cartoons, sometimes shown being drawn, sometimes lovingly animated, are bleakly wonderful. One shows two Klansmen in their white sheets, one of them asking: “Don’t you love it when they’re still warm from the dryer?” Another that ran in Penthouse features a fenced area bearing the sign: “Warning: This area patrolled by lesbians!!” Callahan shows it off at the local bar, where one patron deconstructs “this shared fear of women ... what’s scarier than a group of women that don’t need men?” Another sums it up more succinctly: “It’s funny ‘cause it makes you laugh.” ★★★ Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot opens July 20 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.