THE MIX
By Peter Rainer / Film critic
At its simplest, “Lean on Pete” is about a
boy and his horse. Writer-director Andrew
Haigh, adapting a novel by Willy Vlautin,
has a principled reticence that serves the
story well. I was afraid at first that I would
be watching a sobfest. I needn’t have wor-
ried. Nothing very grand is being attempted
here, but there’s a core of feeling to what we
are witnessing that keeps the sentimentality
in check.
Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson
(Charlie Plummer) has recently relocated
with his itinerant single father, Ray (Tra-
vis Fimmel), to Portland, Ore. It’s summer
break from high school, and Charley, want-
ing to do more than mope about, begins to
frequent the local quarter horse track. A
scruffy trainer and owner, Del Montgomery
(Steve Buscemi), gives the boy part-time
work cleaning the stable and transport
trailer where Del houses his horses, and
pretty soon Charley has bonded with Lean
on Pete, a 5-year-old quarter horse who has
seen better days (and even those days were
none too good).
Haigh initially appears to be priming us
for a generic fable about a lonely boy who
befriends a gruff but kindly father figure,
discovers his equine soul mate, and wins the
racing sweepstakes. Thankfully, it doesn’t
quite work out that way. Del may harbor
a grudging sympathy for the boy, but he’s
also a cheater who, with his accomplice and
jockey, Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), juices his
horses with “vitamins.” When the horses
stop winning, they get unceremoniously
transported to Mexico – i.e., they get sold
for horse meat.
This is the predicament that Charley and
Pete find themselves in. When a violent turn
of events renders Charley essentially home-
less, he attempts to rescue both Pete and
himself by taking to the road. He hopes to
find his way to Wyoming, where a fondly
remembered aunt lives whom he has not
been in touch with for years.
Haigh is British, and his outsider’s eye
probably accounts in part for the film’s lyr-
ically askew vision of working-class fringes- the trailer homes, run-down fairgrounds,
and homeless encampments. Once Charley
and Pete hit the road, the vistas open up,
and yet the effect is more stifling than ex-
pansive. In the vast countryside, the pair
seem closed in by their aloneness, and their
serial misadventures only emphasize their
vulnerability. Charley continually seeks to
reassure Pete by saying to him, “Don’t wor-
ry; it will be OK,” but he could just as well
be talking to himself.
Pete is rather knobby and distract-
ed-looking, and Haigh doesn’t attempt to
frame him in a heroic light. In classics like
“The Black Stallion” or “National Velvet,”
horse and rider are spiritually aligned.
“Lean on Pete” is far more modest. The
movie is really about Charley and his at-
tempt to hold on to his youth even as it is
being rudely wrested from him by the rough
circumstances of his life. His road trip is a
series of comeuppances, starting with his
disillusionment with Del and extending to
an interlude with some knockabout war vet-
erans and then with a homeless man (Steve
Zahn), who is as kindly when sober as he
is enraged when drunk.
Plummer made a sharp impression last
year as John Paul Getty III in the misbegot-
ten “All the Money in the World,” and, in a
very different vein, he impresses here again.
He’s playing a kid who at first seems gangly
and awkward, but he has a wariness that
allows him to persevere. He’s deceptively
resilient.
Buscemi’s performance is likewise mar-
velous. In his scenes with Charley, there’s a
lifetime of scrounging and connivance re-
flected in Del’s gimlet eyes. (Buscemi can
also be seen, as Nikita Khrushchev, no less,
in the recent terrific political satire “The
Death of Stalin.” What a versatile actor he
is!)
Haigh, whose previous films include the
touching gay romance “Weekend” and the
resonant marital drama “45 Years,” works
in the same intuitive, humanist tradition as
Kelly Reichardt, the director of such films
as “Certain Women” and “Night Moves.”
“Wendy and Lucy,” her 2008 movie about
a young woman and her dog, set partially
in the outskirts of Oregon, probably influ-
enced “Lean on Pete.” Like Reichardt’s
films, Haigh’s sometimes drift off into a
desultory nothingness, but he has a real
feeling for people – not to mention horses.
At his best, he can strike more emotional
notes from silence than most directors can
with a full chorus of sound.r Rated R for language and brief violence.CHARLIE PLUMMER STARS IN ‘LEAN ON PETE.’ SCOTT PATRIK GREEN/COURTESY OF A24
DIRECTOR ANDREW HAIGH HAS A REAL FEELING FOR PEOPLE.
ON FILM
‘Lean on Pete’ is a tale
of a boy and his horse
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