•
Rating: Last film by Gus Van Sant, watched yesterday on Amazon Prime after putting off the viewing for quite some time.
Gus Van Sant is a director I really like, perhaps especially for his Last Days, loosely inspired by the last days of Kurt Cobain's life, which is a slow litany with beautiful music, a delicate and poignant ode to pain and solitude, and one of my favorite films.
What I like about Van Sant is precisely his style as an independent director, without stylistic excesses but evocative and melancholic.
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is based on the eponymous biography of cartoonist John Callahan, who was the victim of a car accident that left him semi-paralyzed for life. Callahan is played by Joaquin Phoenix, one of the most popular actors of the moment with a long series of portrayals of troubled characters behind him, which is why I found the choice a bit 'banal', also because Phoenix maintains an air somewhere between sociopathic and alcoholic throughout the film, the first of which is not one of the character's features. I appreciated Jonah Hill very much, however (who also directed Mid90s, a film released last year which I recommend if you like a bit of American underground cinema), who plays Donnie, the organizer of the AA meetings that John begins to attend after the accident.
A large part of the film takes place precisely at Donnie's house, where he organizes therapeutic meetings in which participants vent their memories and grudges, with the aim of forgiving others and themselves. Donnie is a kind of Christian guru, but his figure does not have the ambiguity of a cult leader, on the contrary, he emanates a positive aura, of true suffering and acceptance, interspersed with humor and lightness. John, the true protagonist, must also come to terms with his past as an alcoholic, which indirectly caused the accident, and the memories of his past life merge with the present, creating a picture that is rather coherent in the delineation of his character, whose demeanor seems always the same, but whose choices create a clear demarcation in his life. There is no excessive sentimentality, except for a bit in the love story with the former nurse from the hospital (played by Rooney Mara), but even here Van Sant does not overdo it, nor is there a forced outpouring of emotion: the feelings are there, but the skill lies, in my opinion, in knowing how to express them with delicacy, as if veiled by an impartial, external gaze that observes without blending with what it is watching. And often, in the scenes of the present, the film has an almost documentary-like aspect, with the camera moving from one speaker to another, lingering on each, while they speak, as if it were an interview.
It is a biopic, and in my opinion, it is a very successful one, which recalls John's life just as he does in the meetings, thus creating a device that avoids a linear, individual reconstruction of his life path. The dialogues with others, the squabbles, the hints at each one's problems, and above all the friendship with Donnie allow for a broader view of the situation, and also to not perceive alcoholism as the consequence of a specific event or trauma, but on the contrary as a problem with a myriad of possible causes and that, like many other problems, can be faced and overcome, but that does not mean the pain will go away forever. And the positive message, which is not a real message, but a sort of consideration, is that pain exists, problems exist, and they can accompany you all your life without ultimately destroying it. A reflection that may be banal, but which is no longer so if expressed in the right way.
Unlike many other Van Sant films, here the story concerns exclusively adults, but I like how the director still managed to insert a glimpse of adolescence into the film, through a group of kids on skateboards that John encounters in the street, which Van Sant sketches with sympathy and good humor, instead of the cynicism and stereotyping typical of many contemporary perspectives.
Loading comments slowly
