Review: "Lean on Pete"

This was not the film I was expecting.

You’d think a movie about a boy and a horse would be uplifting and affirming; e.g., damaged human and damaged animal learn to heal together, in the mold of “Seabiscuit.” But stories about young people who grow attached to animals have a long cinematic tradition of sadness and loss.

“Lean on Pete” is from writer/director Andrew Haigh, whose last film, “45 Years,” was a sharp and probing exploration of the hidden pain behind a long marriage. Based on the novel by Willy Vlautin, “Pete” is about a teen boy, Charlie (Charlie Plummer), who has managed to keep a positive outlook despite a life filled with uncertainty and abandonment -- emotionally and otherwise.

Then he gets a job working for a bottom-feeding horse trainer, chiefly looking after an over-the-hill, never-was quarterhorse named Lean on Pete. Normally in a movie of this sort, this would be when circumstances start to turn around for Charlie. He’d start riding Pete, they win the big race, etc.

But instead, things turn into a pile of manure as big as those he shovels out of the stable on a daily basis.

Obviously I don’t want to give anything away, but suffice to say it involves a cross-country journey in which Charlie and Pete are running away as much as they are running toward something. It’s a noble quest, not for any higher purpose beyond continued existence and respect as living beings worth more than what they can do for others.

Plummer is terrific, playing a man-child -- he supplies his age as 16, 18 or 15 at various times -- who is going through big life-changing experiences before he has had a chance to form the emotional armor to protect him. It’s that time in a person’s life where trivialities seem momentous, while truly impactful things are shunted to the side until we can deal with them.

His dad is Ray (Travis Fimmel), a blue-collar loser who moves from place to place and job to job, partying and sleeping around. But he truly loves his kid, and gives Charlie positive encouragement -- at least when he’s around long enough to do so. Charlie mostly lives off Cap’n Crunch and TV.

A new father figure appears in the form of Del (Steve Buscemi), a fourth-rate horse trainer. He used to run around 20 horses, now he’s down to a handful. He tools around in his ancient Ford pickup and trailer, anywhere he can make a few bucks running his horses in a race, whether it’s at a decaying track or just a barn jump.

Del takes Charlie under his wing, showing him the ropes and praising the young man’s work ethic. But he shoos Charlie away from the racing life. “You should do something else, before you can’t do anything else,” Del says.

Charlie also finds a friend in Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), who rides jockey for Del from time to time. She tells Charlie about what it’s like to be a woman in an old-school man’s sport, freely offering her friendship and advice. Such as: don’t treat the horses like pets. Lean on Pete is scraping the bottom of Del’s very shallow barrel, a 5-year-old quarterhorse who’s just fast enough to win a few purses before age and injury catch up.

But it becomes clear that Del, and even Bonnie, view Pete and his ilk as mere conveyances for their own curdled dreams, to be used and cast off as needed. Del makes cryptic references to selling horses “down to Mexico,” and it’s not hard to guess what that means.

I admit that when the film embarked on the second half of its journey, I was initially reluctant to go along on their tough ride. Charlie and Pete have some run-ins, mostly bad, though they encounter a few kind souls. Plummer, already a slender kid, grows positively stick-like as their fortunes fade.

Haigh doesn’t give us the usual easy emotional entry points. For example, he doesn’t shoot Pete in close-up, to suggest the bond between man and beast. And Charlie never once climbs onto Pete’s back. He doesn’t want to be just somebody else demanding a fast ride.

“Lean on Pete” is the wrenching story of a young man yearning for the simplest thing: to be loved and wanted, and return the same. For a while, the best he can do is a horse no one else sees much worth in. That shared need gives them a sort of startling grace.

Review: "All the Money in the World"

F. Scott Fitzgerald was probably not the first to notice it, though maybe he was the one to write it down: Rich people are strange; they're almost like a separate species from us.

I've never been wealthy, but have had the opportunity to observe or interact with a few up close over the years. Being fabulously rich doesn't automatically make you a bad person, but the opportunities and temptation to behave poorly are almost overwhelming.

Even those I would describe as "good rich" were united by a sort of unconscious arrogance, a sense that the people around them exist merely to acquiesce to their whims.

Ever try to disagree with a rich person? They will stare at you with a sort of puzzled detachment, like a wayward chihuahua that growls at them instead of fetching the paper as ordered. They know you can do them no real harm.

(I'm talking the really rich here, not the ordinary well-to-do. The sort who charter or buy airplanes instead of booking flights on one. They are innocent of TSA lines and pat-downs.)

A couple of quick anecdotes from my own experience:

I spent a year trying to nail down an interview with an A-list movie star who was improbably building a home in my neck of the woods. Without boring you with the details, I finally managed to get ahold of the person whose job title indicated he handled all of the star's media interviews. After talking with him on the phone, it became clear that his entire role consisted of keeping people like me away from his client. Like, imagine if the door on your office said "Director of Sales," and your actual job description consisted of preventing any sales from occurring.

Another time I oversaw the shooting of a PSA video that featured a billionaire. I'd done a bunch of these, and had taken to the practice of bringing a bottle of water for each of the principles, writing their name on it with a Sharpie. These shoots usually go on for an hour, requiring a couple dozen takes under hot lights. People's mouths get dry and they have trouble getting their lines out right. Anyway, I handed the b-man his water, and rather than thanking me he he looked annoyed. A flurry of activity was suddenly set off, as one of his many handlers present came forward to whisk the offending libation out of sight, to be replaced with a fancier one from the private stock. I've no doubt someone got a "talking to" about keeping peasant water away from the big man.

Alright, I've been going on for some time now without even mentioning the movie I'm supposed to be reviewing, which is "All the Money in the World." It's not among the higher-profile films coming out at Christmastime, and it's possible the only thing you've heard about it is that Kevin Spacey was in it, until he was not, and his scenes were hastily re-shot with Christopher Plummer replacing him.

All I'll say about the switcheroo is: I'm impressed. That it could be pulled off so quickly -- barely a month before the film's release -- or that Plummer's scenes fit so seamlessly into the whole of the piece. Though it's not the lead role, it's a pivotal one with about 15-20 minutes of screen time. A consummate professional and actor's actor, Plummer is evidently the sort you could hand the script to for the first time 30 minutes before shooting, and he'll still nail it on the first take.

The movie in total is good, not great. It's an "inspired by" look at the kidnapping of Paul Getty (Charlie Plummer, no relation to Christopher), a teen heir to the Getty oil fortune that happened during in Italy during the early 1970s. The young Getty was held for months, and suffered some rather nasty treatment, because his grandfather, tycoon J. Paul Getty (the other Plummer), refused to pay the ransom.

The story really centers on Paul's mother, Gail Harris (Michelle Williams), who was estranged from her husband and out of favor in senior Getty's eyes for supposedly taking his beloved grandchildren away from him. (Never mind that he had not even met them until a few years before the film's events.) She spends the movie trying to navigate a delicate balance between her wealthy ex-father-in-law and his cronies, a sympathetic kidnapper (Romain Duris) and the media scrum that ensued.

She's helped by Fletcher Chase, an ex-CIA agent-turned Getty lackey played by Mark Wahlberg who, I strongly suspect, is one of those pure Hollywood bullshit creations. I couldn't find any mention of such a person in historical accounts of the kidnapping, though it's not surprising that Getty might employ someone like that. There's also that name: Fletcher Chase -- sounds like the lead character in a fourth-rate spy novel.

I've been impressed by how much Wahlberg has evolved as an actor since his "Basketball Diaries" days, but he's pretty clearly miscast in this role. He wears three-piece suits and chunky glasses like they were handed to him by a rando costume designer five minutes before the cameras rolled. Ostensibly cool and professional, he comes off as bored and churlish.

Directed by Ridley Scott from a script by David Scarpa (based on a book by John Pearson), "Money" plays out like a standard-issue procedural crime drama, with all the usual twists and setbacks. We know the kid's going to survive -- otherwise the junior Getty wouldn't have gone on to sire actor Balthazar Getty in real life. So it's mostly an exercise in observing the how rather than the what.

Plummer is really the best thing about the movie. All his scenes sing with energy and music, even the stuff where he squares off with Wahlberg. They share a great moment late in the movie where Getty is walking away from Fletcher, who suddenly grabs him by the arm.

Plummer's eyes flare with a cold fire that illuminates the dark, rotting arrogance inside the old man's soul: The. Sheer. Audacity!

J. Paul Getty was a miserable old miser who placed more value on a stock ticker than his own flesh-and-blood. Not all rich men are like that -- hardly any, let's hope -- but "All the Money in the World" is an effective, if not terribly original, portrait of that which corrupts.

Review: "The Dinner"

Not since “My Dinner with Andre” has a meal seemed so full of portents and human collateral.

“The Dinner,” an intimate drama from writer/director Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”), gathers two brothers and their wives at one of those ridiculous “food art” restaurants for an encounter heavy with familial secrets and strife. Old grudges will be picked over, resentments stoked and then cooled, political ambitions balanced upon the edge of a knife, the future of young lives quarreled over.

Quite literally, by the time the check comes, the guests’ lives will be changed.

It’s a terrific ensemble cast: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall. There’s no true main character, though Steve Coogan serves as the locus of events as Paul Lohman. He’s a former high school history teacher, a hyper-intelligent man who lives deeply inside his own mind, while struggling to relate to anyone on the outside.

Even as he’s interacting with other people -- usually awkwardly -- Coogan’s narration gives us a taste of the constant internal monologue spinning inside his brain, generally involving a mix of Civil War lore and a desperate nihilism about the fate of mankind.

Just about the only one who can reach him is his wife, Claire (Linney), a doctor who applies her great bedside manner to soothing her anxious, uppity mate. We watch her and admire the force of her presence, the beatific way she seems to calm everyone around her, the anchor amidst a sea of tumult.

Later, we’ll find reason to amend our opinion of her.

Gere is Stan Lohman, a Congressman who’s currently the favorite to win the governor’s chair. He’s got a major bill he’s sponsored on tap for a vote tomorrow, and his right-hand woman, Nina (Adepero Oduye), can’t fathom why he’s spending time on a family dinner at a critical juncture. Stan is a politician through-and-through, a clear line that runs through his personal and professional lives: a schmoozer, glad-hander and flimflam man.

But again: down the line, we’ll come to reassess this character.

Rebecca Hall plays Kate, Paul’s self-described “trophy wife,” a much younger and beautiful woman who lends him an air of sophistication and grace. She’s the sort of person people tend to dismiss, and she uses that to bend her environment to her taste.

Chloë Sevigny pops up in flashbacks as Stan’s previous wife, though whether they parted through death or divorce, we know not.

Speaking of flashbacks: there are a lot of them. Based on the novel by Dutch writer Herman Koch, “The Dinner” jumps backward and forward in time with great vigor, to the point we sometimes aren’t sure if what we’re watching came before or after the previous scene. A few changes in hairstyles are our only clue.

But it’s the emotional thread that matters.

Suffice it to say, there was great darkness in the past, and more has arrived on their collective doorstep. I don’t want to say too much, other than it involves their trio of sons: Michael (Charlie Plummer), Paul and Claire’s kid; and Stan’s boys, Rick (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), born to his previous wife, and Beau (Miles J. Harvey), an African-American boy they adopted.

As the dramaturgy unfolds, a parade of fetishized food dishes are presented to them by platoons of waiters, emceed by a host (Michael Chernus) who describes each plate with the overworked prose of a latter-day James Joyce.

(My God, people, it’s food: stick it in your mouth and chew. When you’re hungry again, repeat.)

For a film that’s mostly people sitting and talking, “The Dinner” has an urgent energy about it. We sense that this seemingly ordinary evening will end up as the most important night of their lives. It’s a meal, and a movie, that sizzles.