TV Jesse Pinkman’s Last Stand
The other antihero of ‘Breaking Bad’ gets his own spinoff movie — and the memorable farewell he deserves
With El Camino, the other antihero of Breaking
Bad gets the farewell he deserves.
Writing the adventures of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman required at least as much improvisation as the duo’s criminal escapades entailed. Ultimately, neither the drug dealers nor their storytellers were particularly good at sticking to plans. Much of what made Breaking Bad one of TV’s greatest series ever was how both the show and its main characters backed themselves into corners, then found a way out — usually involving a very big explosion.
The most important deviation from the blueprint came very early. Breaking
Bad creator Vince Gilligan had assumed that Jesse would introduce Walt to the drug world, then get killed. Instead, Aaron Paul proved so utterly compelling in the role that Jesse not only survived, but in time was treated as Walt’s narrative equal. When the series ended, Walt was lying dead on a meth-lab floor, while it was Jesse who was alive and . . . not exactly well, after months of imprisonment and torture, but at least free and on the road to somewhere else.
Now, Jesse has outlived his mentor within both the Breaking Bad narrative and the larger Heisenberg-verse that Gilligan and friends have built in the years since Walt breathed his last. (See also the surprisingly great prequel series Better Call Saul.) El Camino: A Breaking Bad
Movie, written and directed by Gilligan, provides the closure that Jesse didn’t quite get at the end of the original show — when Walt reasserted dominance over the plot — while cementing that Paul is more than capable of carrying a story in this world when Bryan Cranston is absent.
In picking up immediately where the series left Jesse — driving away from the wrecked Nazi compound in the titular vehicle — and going step by painful goddamn step through the many problems Jesse has to solve in his attempt to get out of Albuquerque alive, Gilligan has returned to one of the show’s core tenets. Among the best parts of Breaking Bad was its micro-focus on the nightmarish logistics of criminal enterprise that most stories gloss over: disposing of dead bodies, establishing territory and distribution networks, even something as basic as how to load and use a revolver. The Jesse we follow in El Camino is a more seasoned lawbreaker than when he was going by Cap’n Cook and putting chili powder in his meth, but he’s also not the genius Walt was.
Many of the pleasures of the film involve him stumbling into one trap after another and having only his own tenacity as a useful weapon. (This includes several scenes where he actually has a gun, amusingly enough.)
Gilligan also uses Jesse’s scramble to freedom as something of a corrective to Breaking Bad’s Walt-centric endgame. (Beware: Spoilers follow.) The film is peppered with flashbacks featuring important figures from
Jesse’s life who didn’t survive the series: Jesse and Mike ( Jonathan Banks) contemplating the retirement we know Mike didn’t get to enjoy;
Jesse and his girlfriend Jane (Krysten Ritter) taking a drive together; and Walt trying to offer Jesse some paternal advice. All the cameos are striking — the shot of Paul and Cranston walking side by side in their Season Two finery is spine-tingling in its recollection of a more innocent time in both characters’ lives — yet the most important resurrected character isn’t Walt, but Jesse Plemons as Todd, the white supremacist sociopath who kept Jesse as a slave in the series’ final episodes. In depicting a macabre weekend the two spend together (getting rid of another body, of course), those flashbacks retroactively add more weight to Jesse’s prolonged captivity, while allowing Plemons to steal large swaths of the movie with his portrayal of Todd’s chilling blandness. (Good luck hearing Dr. Hook’s “Sharing the Night Together” ever again without cringing.)
Gilligan has said that El Camino began life as a short film he wanted to craft for the show’s 10th anniversary. This longer final version still feels more like a gift to the fans than something strictly necessary to make the experience of Breaking Bad feel complete. But when you’ve got Vince Gilligan operating near the peak of his powers, it makes for one hell of an entertaining gift.