Lean on Pete--a review

With most of the movie behind us, my wife leaned over and whispered that if things didn't get any better, she was on her way out. The unrelenting darkness is almost overwhelming.

There's this kid, and he's immensely sweet. His mother is nowhere to be found, and his father is a piggish adolescent who dies in a fight about a woman from work he sleeps with. The old man cuts up his insides when he's thrown through a window and dies, the doctor says, from septic shock his whole system took when it could no longer prevent infection. For a while at least, his father's death feels like a metaphor for this entire sad story. 

Lean on Pete is really three stories, as one reviewer says, chained together inexorably by the kid's excruciating misfortunes. The first is a father-and-son story, which includes a couple of the film's only blessed moments as the kid, Charley (Charlie Plummer), finds some refuge in the employ of a horseman named Del (Steve Buscemi), who is himself at the end of his rope. 

Then, the movie becomes a boy-and-his-horse western, set and shot in perfectly endless expanses of the American west, as the two of them run away once Charlie determines that this gorgeous quarter horse he's come to love is on his way to the glue factory. It ends with most horrifying moment in the film, when the storyteller determines, for some reason, that Lean on Pete needed to die.  

That the horse's death seems as willfully random as it is makes the story seem Thomas Hardy-ish: things are bad to start with, and then they get worse and worse and worse and worse, and then they end. That description may be overdoing it, but there were moments when I too thought I couldn't take any more. 

Some see this film's sheer pitilessness as an attribute. I get that. It simply refuses any scent of sentimentality. But that refusal is its own form of sentimentality, really. When life continually takes turns for the worse, over and over and over again, we simply have trouble believing the world we inhabit is that blasted dark. 

Once Lean on Pete is dead, deus ex machina, there's nowhere for the boy to lean, and Charley's flight--he wants badly to find an aunt who, long ago, cared for him--takes him into perilous places with ugly characters, one of whom, in a fit of righteous indignation, he may well have killed with a tire iron. The third story in Charley's pilgrimage ends when he takes the money he had to kill to get back and gets on a bus to Laramie, Wyoming.

Way back when I wrote more fiction, I came to believe that stories had to somehow balance darkness with light. For a writer who believes in a loving God, someone who is, by inexorable faith, committed to a worldview in which there is hope isn't fantasy, now and forever, a story can go searingly into the tortured soul of human depravity as long as that descent is somehow balanced by a similar degree of light at the end of the tunnel. You can't really have redemption without damnation.

But a story that languishes in damnation without a hint of redemption is as false as any cheap Christian morality tale, as sentimental as Kum-bay-ya. What prompted my wife to seriously consider walking out was what we might well call the sermon of the story: for some of us at least, life is just plain bad. Really ugly. Just about bereft of hope.

Hundreds of movies never make it to your local theater because they're not created for 17-year-old kids on dates. Lean on Pete won't be coming any time to soon to your local cineplex. It's way too dark. To call it an art film suggests that it's not as "real" as it is. Lean on Pete a film that someone believed in, a script created from a novel that was much read and much beloved. 

I wasn't surprised when my wife whispered what she did three-quarters of the way through because I recognized something in myself that was kin to what she felt--I wasn't just hoping for something redemptive, I was begging for it, a move the film simply won't deliver until the very, very end--and even then life seems so very tenuous.

To say I enjoyed the film simply doesn't ring true. 

But am I glad I went? Yes. I'm guessing Charlie Plummer is on his way to stardom, and the American West always has star power. But I'm glad I went because Lean on Pete is not simply entertainment. It begged me not simply to feel, but to think about a kid and a horse and life itself. That's not all bad.