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- Custom Article Title: Lean on Pete ★★★1/2
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Charley (Charlie Plummer), the vulnerable teenage protagonist of Lean On Pete, is always on the move. We first see him jogging at dawn, past suburban streets and out towards to the local racecourse. The morning light is benevolent; the camera keeps a smooth distance: all is promise and potential in Charley’s life, or should be...
In pressing need of money and purpose for the summer, Charley makes himself available at the racecourse, where he is soon engaged in menial work for Del (Steve Buscemi), a horse trainer whose fortunes are on a long slide to nothing. The world that Del inhabits is scarcely less pinched than Charley’s: a desultory circuit of regional fairgrounds where the racetracks are dust and cheating is routine. Charley enters this industry oblivious to its corruption, but his father’s frequent strife has taught him how to be cautious; when he learns that Del’s methods are less than honourable, he holds his tongue. He has bonded with Del’s overworked animal Lean On Pete, a russet quarter horse with a white blaze like an anointment on its forehead. ‘He’s not a pet,’ warns Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), Del’s jockey. She might as well have warned Charley not to fall in love. Charley can’t help his feelings, and when he learns that Pete (as Charley calls him) is bound for the abattoir, he takes drastic action. Here the film opens up, almost literally, onto the vista of a boy and his horse on the run.
Charlie Plummer as Charley in Lean on Pete (Transmission Films)
Lean On Pete is the fourth feature film from British director Andrew Haigh, and his first in the United States. Haigh also wrote, directed, and produced the excellent, sadly short-lived HBO television series Looking (2014–15), which was set amid a group of gay friends and lovers living in San Francisco. Looking was distinguished by its particularity of location, bound by the bars, clubs, and workplaces of an intimate urban community. Charley is trying to make it with Pete all the way from Oregon to Wyoming: a massive distance, half of it desert.
Haigh is less convincing, here, in his evocation of North America’s vast geographic scale. He takes some obvious cues from the canon of American road movies, including Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973), but he lacks the eye for surreality, or the feel for transcendence, that made those films so powerful. Nor does he possess the same detailed grasp of the northwestern United States as his peer Kelly Reichardt, whose exceptional filmography, most recently Certain Women (2016), has been set almost exclusively in this part of the world. Charley’s long walk through the wilderness – he can’t actually ride Pete, nor does he want to – is a kind of purgatory where every horizon is the same; it’s a nowhere, not a somewhere, and as such it doesn’t quite stick.
The somewhere that Charley himself has in mind is so vague that it might not even exist. In Wyoming, he believes, is an aunt who will welcome and love him, if only he can discover where she lives. Some previous falling-out over Charley’s welfare has taken place between his father Ray and this Margey; now he must work with the barest handful of clues to try and find her.
Charlie Plummer as Charley in Lean on Pete (Transmission Films)
In a demanding role as Charley – he’s in every single scene – Charlie Plummer compels attention and sympathy. (Plummer also appeared as John Paul Getty III in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, 2017.) We are placed into the role of the parent that Charley lacks, willing him onwards. He’s not a worldly kid, despite his hardscrabble background; half the anxiety of watching this character is knowing just how vulnerable he is – far more so than he realises. The only creature he’ll turn to for help is a horse. Plummer plays the part with an emotional discipline that belies his youth. It is only at the end that he finally allows Charley’s carapace of self-reliance to crack.
Companionship is Haigh’s abiding theme: Weekend (2011), his breakthrough film, took as its subject a one-night stand that blossoms into love, and 45 Years (2015) examined the breaking point of a long-term marriage. Charley and Pete take their place in a long narrative tradition of children and their animal companions; they are both friends and accomplices. But the film is ultimately stranded somewhere between bleak naturalism – Clio Barnard’s devastatingly sad The Selfish Giant (2013), which also focused on boys and horses, comes to mind – and fairy tale. The script piles on obstacles until Charley’s plight begins to feel almost gratuitously cruel, yet implicit all along is the expectation that his fortunes will take a good turn, in the end. That might be the American Dream; it isn’t America’s reality.
Lean On Pete (Transmission Films), 121 minutes, directed by Andrew Haigh, screenplay by Andrew Haigh from a novel by Willy Vlautin. In cinemas November 29.
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