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DON'T WORRY, HE WON'T GET FAR ON FOOT
Director: Gus Van Sant Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black, Tony Greenhand, Beth Ditto, Mark Webber, Ronnie Adrian, Kim Gordon, Udo Kier, Carrie Brownstein MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:54 Release Date: 7/13/18 (limited); 7/20/18 (wider) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 26, 2018 The title Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, a biography of cartoonist John Callahan, comes from one of his cartoons. There's a posse of Old West lawmen on horseback in the desert, and they've stopped at a wheelchair left behind in the sand. The title is the captioned punch line to the drawing. There's one important detail to note: Callahan was severely injured in a car accident in 1972, at the age of 21. He was left paralyzed to the point that he was confined to a wheelchair and considered a quadriplegic, although he still had enough function in his arms and hands to move a felt-tip pen or to raise a bottle of alcohol to his lips. Those two actions make up the primary story of Callahan's life in writer/director Gus Van Sant's movie, an adaptation of Callahan's autobiography—the one with the movie's title, not his follow-up Will the Real John Callahan Please Stand Up? By this point, one should have an idea of Callahan's brand of humor and a basic comprehension of how he used that humor in dealing with his injury and the repercussions. It was a coping mechanism, obviously, and the result was a series of cartoons that ran in various newspapers and magazines—as tiny as a university paper and as prestigious the New Yorker. The cartoons were noteworthy for their simplistic style and their direct, often controversial handling of taboo subject matter. We see a decent number of them in the movie, and yes, when you see a decidedly offensive caricature of an African cannibal in one of the panels, you understand why he and the publications that published his work routinely got negative letters in the mail. Then again, the joke of that particular cartoon isn't the caricature. It's the waiter standing next to the table where the cannibal is sitting. He's missing an arm and a leg, and there's a pool of blood at his feet. Even that's not the joke. It's the fact that the waiter is asking, "Will there be anything else, sir?" There's more about the way that Callahan's mind worked in this single panel than there is in the entirety of the movie. Van Sant seems to be banking on that fact—that his subject created such unique, confrontational, and divisive cartoons that their appearance can do most of the heavy lifting in presenting a deeper examination of the man. In a way, that's almost admirable—letting an artist's work speak for itself. It also puts a significant limitation on the narrative of Callahan's life within the movie. Since everything about his distinct way of looking at the world is restricted to flashes of his cartoons, Callahan's story has been reduced to a string of miseries, followed by a quick trajectory toward becoming an inspirational figure for overcoming adversity. The narrative doesn't have much focus on him as a person, except to show us that Callahan, who died at the age of 59 in 2010, was an alcoholic and that he drew cartoons after the accident that left him paralyzed. There's more to it than those two things, of course, but every character, every revelation of his past, and every significant piece of the story ultimately goes back to one of those elements. The lack of focus is clear from the start, when Van Sant's screenplay uses four separate framing devices in order to tell this story. One has John (Joaquin Phoenix) at an awards presentation or a speaking engagement in a packed auditorium telling his life story. Another has John as the key speaker at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting telling his story. A third has him detailing the events of his life to a small group of AA members with their sponsor Donnie (Jonah Hill), and the final one has John telling a group of kids whom he meets on the street about his life. His story is always the same, of course, including little jokes that John makes in the telling. Because of the multiple framing devices, Van Sant gives us a fractured view of Callahan's life, too, moving between time before the accident, after the accident but before his recovery from alcoholism, and as he's in the process of going through the 12 steps of the program. The bulk of it is John going through AA, as he learns to forgive others, including a mother who gave him up for adoption and the man (played by Jack Black) who was driving drunk the night of the car crash, and himself for his actions. Along the way, he starts drawing cartoons, battles with his government welfare caseworker (played by Carrie Brownstein), and meets a woman named Annu (Rooney Mara), who helped him in the hospital and later becomes a romantic partner. The story gives us an outline of Callahan's life, backed up by a structure of his recovery from alcoholism. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot seems disinterested with the rest and especially with giving its subject a life, a sense of personality, or a purpose beyond his addiction and his handicap. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and alcohol abuse)
