The unlikely runaways who just might steal your heart
BRITISH writer-director Andrew Haigh makes films about intense relationships. You could say that about many film-makers, but with him it’s especially so.
His acclaimed 2011 picture Weekend was about two gay men getting to know each other over the course of 48 hours, while 2015’s engrossing 45 Years was a forensic study of a long marriage, for which Charlotte Rampling received a deserved Best Actress nomination in the Academy Awards.
In Lean On Pete, he focuses on an American teenager called Charley (Charlie Plummer), whose mother has long since abandoned him. Charley’s key relationships are first of all with his feckless father (Travis Fimmel), then with Del, a dissolute racehorse trainer played (one is tempted to add ‘obviously’) by Steve Buscemi, who takes Charley under his decidedly tattered wing.
But eventually Charley sees there’s no future for him with Del, and his kindly but world-weary stable jockey (Chloe Sevigny).
The only reliable creature in his universe is the titular Lean On Pete, a horse destined for a Mexican
dogfood factory until Charley absconds with him, and the unlikely pair take off on an epic road trip in the hope of finding one of the boy’s long-lost relatives.
The film reminded me a little in places of Ken Loach’s Kes, and also, in its visual hymn to the wide-open spaces of the United States, of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey.
Perhaps most of all, though, it evokes those Sunday afternoon Disney films about a gutsy teenager and his fourlegged companion, crossing the prairies.
Or would, if poor Charley didn’t fall headlong into quite so many horrible misadventures, of the kind those wholesome Disney TV movies never touched.
It’s not a flawless film. Charley’s bad luck begins to seem preposterous, and there’s no real explanation of why this kid, after such a miserable start in life, has ended up so polite, so likeable, and on the whole, so virtuous.
But then that’s why we engage with him, and yearn for his fortunes to turn. It’s a tremendously watchable performance from Plummer, and a film well worth seeing.