flick review

Don't Worry, He Won't Go Far on Foot Is a Perfect Showcase for Joaquin Phoenix

Photo: Scott Patrick Light-green/Courtesy of Sundance

The championship of the wrenching addiction drama Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot is a mouthful, merely it certainly does evoke the life of the sardonic cartoonist and quadriplegic John Callahan. Information technology's the caption of a panel, spoken by a cowboy leading a posse who comes upon an overturned wheelchair in the desert. I'll let y'all visualize that for a crush. The epitome is both funny and grim. But Callahan's wheelchair falls over lots of times in the movie — he'south a hot dog tooling beyond busy intersections — and he somehow survives. Maybe he could even have out-crawled that posse.

The film is primarily a celebration of the 12 Steps, which all but guarantees a groan out of most non-AA people. That's no knock on the steps or Alcoholics Anonymous, which has saved a lot of lives, but movies in which wayward addicts straighten out their lives (and souls, if you believe in such things) according to a set regimen are more than alike than unalike. In this case, happily, the director and screenwriter is Gus Van Sant, who makes movies that conform to no recognizable templates, and Joaquin Phoenix (who plays Callahan) is one among the about thrillingly unpredictable film actors live. Phoenix tends to get lost in his parts, which can lead him (forth with his films) astray. Only when his high-wire emotional arc suits the flick, there are few who can touch him.

Van Sant (who worked from Callahan'due south memoir of the same title) cuts among several dissimilar timelines, which acquired confusion for at least one viewer, just pays off when the timelines merge at the very terminate. Now, the orange-haired Callahan is sitting in his motorized wheelchair telling his story before a large, rapt audience in a Portland auditorium. Now, he'due south telling a version of the same story in some kind of AA-related therapy group presided over past Jonah Hill looking like a fey Jesus. Now, there are flashbacks of his life at various junctures, including the final day he walked on two legs — which began while he was all the same drunk from the dark before and ended in catastrophe.

What makes Phoenix's operation especially exciting is that you're watching not only a character become from chaos to self-possession just an actor, also. He looks unhinged when, in his convalescent scenes, he weaves around, accosting an attractive immature woman on the beach in Southern California, squatting behind a car to stop off a canteen of tequila, and, of course, sliding behind the wheel. Phoenix lets Callahan's inner compass signal due south, toward the abyss.

Immediately postal service-catastrophe, Callahan is still an unruly presence, visibly chafing against the limitations of his body (he has full use of at least 1 arm) and finding artistic ways to tip a bottle of vodka into his mouth. As Van Sant demonstrated in Drugstore Cowboy, getting clean requires not merely self-denial merely a reinvention (and, in the short term, a weakening) of one'due south unabridged persona. So Phoenix'south Callahan get-go rails against his abandonment by his mother at birth (he blames his habit on others), lashes out at young man AA members, and and then slowly begins to listen to voices other than his ain. There'southward an AA slogan that goes, "Don't just sit at that place. Practise nothing." That'due south what Phoenix shows Callahan doing and that'due south what Phoenix does, too.

A moving-picture show like Don't Worry … can rise or autumn on those AA group-therapy sessions, and these are the all-time I've seen. They're actually not formal AA events, though: They take place in the well-appointed business firm of Jonah Hill'southward Donnie and are just for Donnie'due south sponsees — or "piglets," every bit he refers to them. Dissimilar regular AA meetings, these take "cross-talk" — i.e., lots of interruptions and opportunities to vent, and Van Sant manifestly encouraged a spontaneous flow. No less than Kim Gordon plays the ex-suburban housewife and Valium aficionado who tells a story almost wandering her neighborhood buck naked. Udo Kier is doing … something from the planet of Udo Kier. A start-time actress, the 36-year-former musician Beth Ditto, all but takes over as the large and lovably extroverted member of the grouping.

Off to the side, drinking it all in, is Hill'south Donnie, and Hill gives quite a functioning. Early on, he seems so intent on establishing his bona fides as a serious thespian (a recurrent problem) that information technology'due south hard to concentrate on his words. But gradually you can sense the intelligence that shaped his performance. Donnie is a rich boy, and then entitlement would exist second nature. It's Donnie, not Hill, who's striving to projection approbation (he'due south fond of quoting Lao Tzu), and his limp wrists are not Loma'due south way of signaling the character's homosexuality but an emblem of relaxation and openness. Donnie spouts a fair number of familiar Taoist/AA tropes and Higher Ability stuff that I tin can take or get out, just Colina makes yous adore the guy's spirit.

Van Sant maintains an improvisatory spirit, too. He has elicited a stupendous score from Danny Elfman that's largely bebop but with alternately eerie and comforting orchestral noodling. Perchance considering the film is set in the '70s and '80s, Van Sant and his dynamic cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt utilise a period device — a zoom lens — to jump closer to Phoenix at moments of revelation. They zoom in on the cartoons that Callahan draws — with tenuous dexterity merely remarkable concentration — when the recovered alcoholic finds his true calling. And sometimes Van Sant even animates those cartoons. (NB: Callahan had as many haters every bit admirers. In his work, he depicts feminists as overbearing and lesbians every bit terrifying. But he found his own nature terrifying, likewise. He was a bad boy to the end.)

I'm not sure what the hell Rooney Mara is doing as a glassy blonde Swedish physical therapist turned flight attendant — I hoped she'd plow out to exist a figment of Callahan's imagination (he has a few) but no such luck. Everyone else is wonderful, from the top of the bandage list to the bottom. Jack Black is Dexter, the wild-man alcoholic who led Callahan off the precipice. He'southward predictably Jack Blackness–ish (gonzo) in his beginning sequence. His 2nd, years later, when Callahan tracks him downwardly as office of the ninth step, is revelatory.

In a Q&A later the Sundance earth premiere, Van Sant was pocket-size and generous. Beth Ditto didn't desire to surrender the microphone: She idea peradventure she'd never act in a movie again. (A number of audience members called out, "Yes! Y'all will!") Phoenix was a no-show, prompting Hill to text him from the stage. I kind of liked that he blew it off. I didn't want my memory of his brilliance onscreen to exist dimmed past his trademark coy monosyllables and exhibitionistic discomfort in the spotlight.

Don't Worry He Won't Get Far on Human foot Is A+ Joaquin Phoenix