‘Lean on Pete’ no Lifetime feel-good film
Andrew Haigh's film "Lean on Pete" moves from AMC River Park Square to the Magic Lantern today. It's worth checking out, though you might want to read my review, which I wrote for Spokane Public Radio:
If nothing else, Andrew Haigh’s film “Lean on Pete” asks what it would take for someone to turn bad. If, for example, you have a good soul but are continually subjected to pain and disillusionment, what kind of person would you become?
Because, despite everything, our protagonist Charley (played by Charley Plummer) is a good kid. He lives with his father in a cheap rental house near Portland Downs racetrack. Charley sleeps on the floor, and his dad (played by Travis Fimmel) – who does have a job and seems friendly enough – treats his boy more like a buddy than a son. He doesn’t even think to buy groceries for his growing 15-year-old.
Turns out they’d just moved to Portland from Spokane, where Charley had been playing high-school football. So when dad is at work, Charley jogs through the neighborhood with thoughts that he might again get to play.
It’s on one of those jogs that he discovers the racetrack. And pretty soon he meets Del (played by Steve Buscemi), a prickly tempered horse owner who participates in the shadowy part of the quarter-horse racing world – where rules are merely something to work around and horses are merely a means to a financial end.
Pretty soon, Charley is working for Del, accompanying him on trips around the Northwest, where he both meets the jaded jockey Bonnie (played by Chloe Sevigny) and becomes attached to an aging horse named Pete.
And this is where “Lean on Pete,” which writer-director Haigh adapted from a tough little 2010 novel by Willy Vlautin, heads in a direction that no Lifetime movie has ever explored.
After his father gets seriously injured in a fight with his lover’s estranged husband, and when he discovers that Del plans on sending Pete to Mexico – a euphemism, he knows, for the slaughterhouse – Charley decides to act.
But what can a kid with no money do? Especially a kid with no goal in mind expect for a vague notion of finding the once-beloved aunt he thinks lives somewhere in Wyoming? That’s the moral crossroads for Charley, and what he does next seems only natural to his teenage brain: Steal Pete and head east – never mind that his fantasy goal lies maybe a thousand miles away.
Haigh, following the lead of Vlautin, documents the world that Charley encounters, from the hard-edged owners, trainers and jockeys of the racing game, to hard-drinking veterans from America’s never-ending modern wars, young women living with abusive relatives because they have no other choice and restaurant workers who are less kind than merely pragmatic about a boy’s attempts to grab a free meal and go.
He does find a few moments in which the boy and horse relish in their freedom, swimming in a river and sleeping under the stars. But again, “Lean on Pete” doesn’t pander to melodrama. Haigh’s movie is no “Lassie Come Home” pipe dream.
And in the end, after all he has been through, what becomes of Charley? That’s the question we’re left with, the question to which there are no easy answers.