USA
3*
Director:
David Gordon Green
Screenwriter:
David Gordon Green
Director of Photography:
Tim Orr
Running time: 115 minutes
David Gordon Green is one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation. Sure, he made the slapstick comedies Your Highness and The Sitter and gone to the well of stoner comedy once too often, but he also made the poetic Prince Avalanche, which enveloped Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch in an ambience reminiscent of both his earlier work and of Hayao Miyazaki’s gorgeous animations. His meditative Undertow, starring Dermot Mulroney and Jamie Bell and produced by Terrence Malick, is easily one of the best films of the 2000s.
In Joe, he returns to the Southern Gothic atmosphere many have labelled his early work with, and as with Undertow much of the action takes place deep in a forest. But Green’s latest film just proves how fine the line is between his magic and his mediocrity, especially when the casting process leads to a collaboration, or rather a tribulation, with Nicholas Cage.
Cage did some good work when he was younger, and his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas is well deserved. But that is where his talent ended because his grimaces ever since and his expressions of pain just don’t take us anywhere. In Joe, the reason his emotional outbursts are painful is that they are so embarrassing to watch.
But luckily the casting also yielded the young Tye Sheridan, who made such an impression with his performance in Mud, another film set in the rural South about a flawed man who redeems himself ever so slightly by the end. In both films, Sheridan hits a range of notes that are all wholly credible and keep us rapt. But whereas Mud had Matthew McConaughey to reinforce Sheridan’s character, Joe only has Cage, who as usual can’t act his way out of a paper bag.
Cage stars as the titular Joe, a loner who spends his time at home lying on the couch, clearly dealing with some past torment or afflicted by a demon, at a brothel, and in the woods, where he runs a business poisoning trees so that the owners would have the right to burn them down and develop the area. As one should expect from Green, the metaphor of poisoning trees (or life) is at once straightforward and opaque.
Joe doesn’t have much in the way of family that we know of (in a throwaway comment toward the end, we find out he has a grandchild he has never seen), but then, we know very little about him. The most obvious part of the film is that Joe is positioned as the father figure to a teenage boy, Gary (Sheridan), whose own father is a worthless drunk who takes his money and beats him senseless whenever he gets the chance. One day, Gary comes upon Joe’s business in the forest and proves himself to be a quick learner and a very capable worker. We like him almost immediately, even when he lets himself get beaten up by his ever-intoxicated biological father.
This part of the film is the most frustrating, as we learn very early on that the deceptively scrawny Gary can stand up for himself, that he is a push-over for no one, except his father, whom he can evidently take down if he wanted to. There is some halfhearted explanation that seeks to justify Gary’s passivity, but it is tough to side with him when all we want is for him to stand up for himself against this unnecessary violence.
Joe doesn’t have the same kind of insight as a film like Evil (Ondskan), in which a young man who easily knocks out his school mates is beaten time after time by his father because he is not living up to his expectations. Evil made us ask “Why?” before ultimately delivering a stunning blow that was both physically and intellectually satisfying and put all that came before in a context that may have been carved out for dramatic purposes but made sense and had a powerful impact on the viewer. By contrast, Joe only posits a situation on repeat that never improves and which we can’t quite line up with the immanently likeable Gary. We feel like we are slowly drowning in a presentation, albeit gritty and very likely true to life (Gary’s father, Wade, was played by a real-life homeless man called Gary Poulter), that simply doesn’t give us the answers we are looking for, despite building to what we would expect to be a climactic event.
It should be obvious to everyone by now that Sheridan will be a big star, and one can only hope that he continues to choose his projects as wisely as he has until now, as the characters have suited his abilities perfectly, even when the films themselves have not been consistently good. Joe could have done with a few more female characters, although a comparison with the nearly woman-free Undertow shows just what he can accomplish when he puts his mind to a project and focus on the interesting characters (usually, the children) instead of the supposedly more complex adults, who in the case of Joe are dull as dishwater.
I sincerely hope Green returns to the heights of Undertow because while Joe is far from bad, his films have always benefited from his eye for the beauty in the ordinary and his ability to add a dash of magic to the everyday.