Joe (David Gordon Green, 2014)

[flyonthewall2983]

Trailer

[pzadvance]

Got treated to a sneak of Joe the other night (with David Gordon Green and Nic Cage in attendance!) courtesy of the American Cinematheque. Green's one of my favorite filmmakers when he's really operating at full capacity and not making anonymous shit like The Sitter, but everything I saw in the lead-up to this didn't do too much to get me excited: trailers and synopses made it seem like an oddly speedy Mud redo, right down to the casting of Tye Sheridan in the "young boy who meets a mysterious adult stranger and gets taken under his wing" role.

Well, I'm happy to report that not only did I find Joe a far richer and more interesting film than Mud, but it's also got Green's fingerprints all over it in ways that I can't really blame the promotional materials for ignoring. There are, indeed, the beats of the story as advertised in this film, and it's nothing that we haven't seen before--in Mud and elsewhere. But it's everything in between those beats that rose to the surface for me and really made this a unique, special experience.

For starters, Sheridan and Cage are essentially the only professional actors in a cast mostly consisting of Texas locals, and we get some really fantastic and unexpected performances as a result. Gary Poulter was living on the streets prior to being cast as Sheridan's abusive dad (and, tragically, was found dead a couple months after filming), but creates a fascinating, layered character that is by turns endearing and funny and tragic and terrifying, and occasionally finds intriguing overlaps therein. Ronnie Blevins' character, the ostensible "bad guy" of the piece, might have veered into mustache-twirling in a lesser director's hands (covered in ominous scars as he is), but there's a great humor to all of his scenes,

Spoiler

right down to his Inigo Montoya-esque mantra, "I went through a windshield at 4 A.M. and I don't give a fuck!"

Cage gives a great performance that is all about restraint, and Sheridan seems to get better with each new role. This kid's making absurdly smart career choices (Malick/Nichols/Green in his first three outings?!) and I really hope he continues along this track. The two have great chemistry together and build a believable and compelling relationship between their characters. Their best scene is

Spoiler

an extended montage in which they scour the town for Cage's missing dog--it's pure DGG magic, clearly improvised, with the two discussing how to make a "cool face" while searching through an abandoned shipyard and getting drunk off cheap beer.

That the film makes time for these digressions is its biggest strength and lends it a texture and depth of both character and environment that pays off in spades--by the time we get around to the actual plot resolution, all of the more traditional moments feel fully earned and have an added emotional weight that wouldn't be there without these scenes, which deepen our understanding of and appreciation for the characters.

Between this and Prince Avalanche, it's great to see Green starting to fulfill his early promise. I'm thankful for the work he's given us in Pineapple Express and Eastbound and Down, and it's clear even from his early dramatic work that he has excellent, odd comedic sensibilities. But it seems that for the most part, his studio comedies couldn't or wouldn't make room for his specific idiosyncrasies, and as a result, we got some real shoddy work that was well below a director of Green's potential. Prince Avalanche was a great back-to-basics sort of film that seems to have served as an ideal transition out of his Hollywood exile (for now, anyway). Joe proves that he can take salable dramatic material and really make it his own in a way that both benefits the material and serves his own artistic preoccupations. It'll be interesting to see how the public responds to it as a result, but I hope we can expect more work like this from Green in the future.

[warren oates]

How would you say that Joe compares to say, Undertow, which for me is very underrated? Or to Snow Angels, which for me is probably even worse than a one-two punch of The Sitter and Your Highness if only because the Stewart O'Nan novel it's based on is so good and so lyrical and the film itself is just kind of a plotty histrionic melodrama.

[pzadvance]

How would you say that Joe compares to say, Undertow, which for me is very underrated? Or to Snow Angels, which for me is probably even worse than a one-two punch of The Sitter and Your Highness if only because the Stewart O'Nan novel it's based on is so good and so lyrical and the film itself is just kind of a plotty histrionic melodrama.

It feels closest in spirit to an Undertow, probably, which is definitely underrated and which also had a narrative backbone that gave Green a structural framework to improvise within. I love Undertow, but I might have found even more to enjoy in Joe. Or maybe I'm just overly excited to see Green making good choices again. Time will tell.

[Jeff]

Co-sign on Undertow being hugely underrated. I think that I slightly prefer both it and the oft-compared Mud to Joe, but this is a very good film. I think that it's the kid-focused, fairy tale aspect of those earlier entries in the "boy comes of age in the violent south" genre that gets me. Minor preferences aside, I'm with pzadvance pretty much across the board, especially on his comments regarding the chemistry between Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan, both of whom are doing great work here. Cage hasn't been this nuanced in ages (though I adored his unhinged Bad Lieutenant). Here he has fully developed this sort of brooding, laconic -- yet surprisingly charming -- antihero that writer Gary Hawkins has rightly compared to Shane and Yojimbo in their eponymous films.

The film manages to be both loose and plotty, and it's at its best during those improvised moments with their very real dialogue

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(about popping and locking, making the "cool face," and scoring a tangled deer après-IHOP).

The more obviously scripted stuff, including some awkward exchanges between Joe and his girl, doesn't work nearly as well. The ending is largely inevitable and predictable too, but the pleasure comes from Green's meandering journey there.

[warren oates]

I guess I'd have to agree with Jeff and pzadvance about the quality of the acting, the authenticity of the improvisations and the excellent use of local nonactors. To that I'd add that the film does show us a relationship between characters that I'd never quite seen before, that of Joe and the local cops, who sometimes arrest him, sometimes try to keep him from forcing them to arrest him again. But the overall impact of the film itself was, for me, doomed by the second-rate source material. Now, I haven't read the novel this was based on, so it might be a case like Snow Angels, where the best and most interesting aspects of the literary source were ignored or tossed aside in favor of its melodramatic plot. What made it into the movie storywise was just pretty dreadfully boring and predictable. In the end, nothing happened that I didn't expect. The two main characters had no arc. And nobody had to do anything that was more of a conflict (hard to want to do) than an obstacle (hard to do) -- and some of the obstacles didn't even feel that formidable.

Spoiler

Like, for instance, when more than three quarters of the way through the runtime Joe asks Gary the question any audience member was thinking in the first 10 minutes or so: "You're smart and resourceful enough. Why don't you just leave your abusive family?" And his answer is the lamest kind of story-continuing deflection: "Um, because of my mute sister." Who, by the way, as a direct result of his not leaving (as if he somehow couldn't take her too) gets to be pimped out by her father, almost raped and nearly killed in the process. Which makes you wonder why their shitty no-good murderous thieving drunken rapey father even bothered to wait this long in the first place to try selling both his wife and daughter to, conveniently enough, the same local asshole who wants to kill Joe for next to no good reason. And the only good answer is because this awful story needed some kind of climactic set piece that it had neither built up to nor earned dramatically.

It's not that I don't believe that real people live in horrible situations like some of these characters. It's that the film fails utterly to convince me that they would do what they do in these circumstances.

[colinr0380]

Major spoilers:

I really liked this though I would agree on the film seemingly fighting between its scenes of Joe going around and performing his tasks or chatting with local characters in the early section of the film that get somewhat subdued once the main plot has to kick in. But even though that felt like a well worn plot about fathers and sons, child abuse and surrogate fathers who are themselves flawed that followed a lot of predictable beats, I still really enjoyed seeing that story played out and it is extremely well told. I was impressed though that the film was able to take its time with the early scenes to ease the viewer into the atmosphere of the world more than anything else before having to go into the conflicts. I could have watched another hour of all that stuff! Also the turning point scene is a neat example of a brutal disruption to the narrative in which one film suddenly takes a left turn into being something else, as the long scene of Joe cutting steaks from a deer while chatting ends with him being shot in a drive-by shooting.

This isn't to denigrate the 'story' section of the film though, as I thought that was extremely well handled too. I even strangely found the rather heavy handed portrayal of an alcoholic flake of an abusive father to be somewhat sympathetic (and this might just be down to the way that Gary Poulter plays him) in the way that he seems continually getting pushed into newly terrible situations which make him lash out ever more violently. That doesn't mitigate his actions though, but I thought it was nice that I still felt some sympathy for Wade even after the film continues piling ever more horrible aspects onto his character: the alcoholism turning into being workshy and lazy, turning into beating his son and taking his son's pay, turning into casual murder over a bottle of wine (where were the police then, compared to harassing Joe! That murder tellingly doesn't even appear to turn up on their radar), turning into beating his son and threatening him with a knife (which kind of justifies the murder scene before, as we've just seen how far he'll go for nothing, let alone his son trying to stand up to him), turning into heavily implied sexual abuse of the daughter which is what turned her mute, turning into pimping the daughter out (for "$30...each") to the other antagonists of the film. There's no redemption or atonement available for that character, even if he wanted such a thing, and he is manipulated into the single irredeemable monster of the entire film, as if the entire situation could be cleansed purely by getting rid of him. No wonder he jumps from the bridge in the end, after the film apparently purposefully prevents Joe from shooting him. That's a calm act of Wade finally acknowledging that he has to leave the world for all the wrongs he has done.

In a way Wade and Joe are pretty alike. They both have a kind of fatalistic death wish and undercurrent of simmering violence ready to explode. Joe is just trying to keep it reigned in though in face of regular, arguably more justified, provocations. I particularly liked the paired monologues in the middle of the night, first from Joe talking about "what else is there?", as if he is a character in search of a reason for being, which gets overlaid by images of the people in his life, and his past. A simple narrative to his life. Does he have to create it himself, or are there people around him who don't mind creating one for him into which he can be slotted? The second monologue is the girl who comes to live with him, Connie, just talking about simply existing and living a life where they can "get dressed up and go out" once in a while to the seemingly asleep Joe in bed as the scene dissolves away, taking her with it. That's her last scene before she leaves Joe again (and she does leave, unlike Gary even thinking of leaving his abusive father), seemingly acknowledging that this life can never happen, and her departure both coincides with the final act and removes any other commitments allowing Joe to fulfil a sense of noble sacrifice for the sake of the boy (It is also about getting to the point where Joe can finally hug Gary and tell him that it will be OK and Gary can stay with him, which is a great moment)

It is maybe a little overwrought that there is a grand metaphor of Joe's job being to poison the trees (because they're unwanted wood that needs to be cleared to allow wanted trees to be planted in their place) which is then contrasted by Gary finding a new job and father figure in someone who actually plants trees in the final shot. I guess it sort of works though in the way that the film becomes about the various flawed masculine figures in the town making way for the younger Gary and his sister to live on in peace (Joe, Wade, Willie-Russell. I particularly like that Willie-Russell's big 'bad guy' is just a small time bully who even our teenage hero beats up at one point! And of course gets undermined as the irrelevant blowhard he is in his final scene whilst in the middle of doing his big, well rehearsed speech!). It has a kind of heart on its sleeve earnestness about it, as well as a forceful move from death and depression set against the hope of a new beginning, that fits with the rest of the film.