Wit rescues the sugary moments
Don’t Worry, He Won’t
Get Far on Foot (M, 114 mins) Directed by Gus Van Sant. Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
John Callahan was adopted as a child by an Irish Catholic couple who believed they could not conceive. They went on to have five more children of their own.
John was packed off to a boarding school where he was molested by at least one of his teachers. He discovered alcohol at 12 and within a year was a selfdescribed raging alcoholic with a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit and a barely suppressed death wish.
In 1973, 21-year-old John was out on a bender with a newly acquired friend who drove into a power pole. John had his spinal column shattered by the impact. The friend walked away with barely a scratch.
Confined to a wheelchair, with a ‘‘carer’’ usually too stoned to remember to empty his colostomy bag, John carried on drinking with a vengeance. He discovered a talent for raw and ascerbic cartooning that would win him national fame. And then John decided to get sober.
Robin Williams optioned Callahan’s story and contacted his old Good Will Hunting collaborator Gus van Sant to adapt and direct a filmed version. But life and death intervened, and the project went on the back burner until last year, when Joaquin Phoenix and van Sant got together to finally put Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot on the screen.
I don’t know if there’s an actor alive who could have captured Callahan’s hard-earned mix of self loathing and towering egotism the way Phoenix does here.
He magnetises and weaponises the smallest of gestures while building up a portfolio of moments that just might earn Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot a nomination or three as awards’ season opens.
Next to Phoenix, Jonah
Hill is astonishing and near unrecognisable as Callahan’ s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor Donnie. The material these two work with might occasionally veer into the saccharine, but they deliver it with wit and acidity.
Rooney Mara plays a seeming composite of Callahan’s partners, and deserves far more impact on the narrative than she is allowed.
Van Sant proved with Elephant and Last Days he knows how to ‘‘fake real’’ better than most. His skillset works well in the service of this much-invented ‘‘true story’’.
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot veers from being a darkly comic gem to a cloying weepy, occasionally within the same scene. With a bit more resolve and bloody-mindedness, Callahan’s story could have yielded a biopic classic. As it is, this is still a very good and watchable film.