![]() ![]() Instead of sending him to school, Charley’s shaggy-dog single father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), hands him $20 for food with apologies that it can’t be more. The mise-en-scène, like the landscape, often speaks more loudly than the film’s characters: The sight of a small home’s empty cupboards, empty beer bottles, and unpacked boxes gets at the poverty and transience of Charley’s recent existence, and a few football trophies hint at a more stable past. Lean on Pete, based on the 2010 novel by Willy Vlautin, exudes a quiet but self-evident sense of struggle-a sensibility that it shares with the films of Kelly Reichardt and the short stories of Alice Munro. As the film begins, 15-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) is adjusting to this new world at the same time that he’s growing into his body, exploring the outskirts of Portland, Oregon on long runs around a shabby neighborhood. ![]() Compassionate yet unsentimental, the film finds Haigh decamping from England to the American Northwest, where the vastness of the landscape stands in stark contrast with lives of constrained potential: Nearly everyone is a day laborer of one kind or another, and even friendship seems contingent on modest financial gains. ![]() If Andrew Haigh’s previous features, Weekend and 45 Years, explored the vagaries of intimacy, Lean on Pete surveys a world where affection and companionship are harder to come by.
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