AN AIMLESSLY DIVERTING JOURNEY
“The Peanut Butter Falcon” is a nice little movie that barely goes anywhere, but audiences, in a certain mood, might be willing to drift along with it. It’s most notable for starring, in a principal role, a man with Down syndrome, Zack Gottsagen, who is a good actor — he’s funny and interesting and holds the screen.
Basically, it’s about two guys who don’t quite belong anywhere and how they come together. Shia LaBeouf is Tyler, a rough mess of a guy living in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He’s grief stricken over the death of his older brother but doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary to face his own misery, and so he’s foolish and destructive. He barely gets out of town alive, with a gang of tough guys on his tail.
Meanwhile, Zak (spelled without the c) lives in an old-age home. He’s young, but his family has abandoned him, and the state has nowhere else to put him. He has an exceptionally nice attendant (Dakota Johnson), but that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s facing a life sentence of being warehoused. And so he jumps out the window in his little white briefs, forgetting to take his clothes and shoes with him. His ambition is to become a professional wrestler.
Inevitably the two men meet and go on the run together, and how much you enjoy this movie will depend on how much you enjoy the interaction between LaBeouf and Gottsagen. Let’s lavish some praise on this: It’s never quite boring. And the movie does benefit from LaBeouf’s portrayal of Tyler as a genuinely rough character, not as a diamond in the rough, more like a jagged rock in the rough.
But there’s nothing here to propel our interest from scene to scene. There’s nothing the characters want that we hope to see happen. Zak’s desire to be a wrestler is more a fantasy than anything else. And Tyler is truly aimless. It’s almost like his life is over before it has even started. Yet there’s poignancy in that, too, and a further point of contact between Tyler and Zak. Tyler has blown his chances, and Zak was never given a chance, so either way, they’re both out of chances and depending on each other.
Writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Mike Schwartz eventually figure out a way to put both characters on a raft floating down the Pamlico Sound, and you have to give these filmmakers credit for nerve. A fellow named Mark Twain cornered the market on two outcasts floating on a raft, enjoying their freedom and each other’s company. But I knew Huckleberry Finn. I worked with him. Huckleberry Finn was a friend of mine, and … well, you get the drift.
Fortunately, the movie gets a huge lift from Dakota Johnson, who reappears in the second half of the film and rescues it from nonstop boys’ hijinks. It’s not enough to say the camera loves her. Put Johnson in a close-up, and the rest of the movie disappears.
Anyway, you see what I’m doing here. I really don’t want to be mean and tell you to see this movie. But I definitely want to tell you to see this movie. I just want you to have the facts. The rest is up to you.