Movie Review: The Peanut Butter Falcon

The Peanut Butter Falcon *** / *****

Directed by: Tyler Nilson & Michael Schwartz.

Written by: Tyler Nilson & Michael Schwartz.

Starring: Zack Gottsagen (Zak), Dakota Johnson (Eleanor), Bruce Dern (Carl), Shia LaBeouf (Tyler), Thomas Haden Church (Salt Water Redneck), Rob Thomas (Winkie), Jon Bernthal (Mark), Tim Zajaros (Orderly), John Hawkes (Duncan), Yelawolf (Ratboy), Deja Dee (Janice), Lee Spencer (Glen), Mark Helms (Trucker), Michael Berthold (Billy), Bruce Henderson (Convenience Store Clerk).

 

I avoided The Peanut Butter Falcon when it appeared in theatres this past summer – thinking that I knew precisely the film it would be, and not wanting to subject myself to a series of feel good clichés – about a character with Down Syndrome teaches the rest of the cast what is truly important about life, and inspiring us all in the audience to remember the same. To be fair, there is a lot of that in this film – the film doesn’t attempt to avoid clichés throughout. And yet, the film was charming and funny, and yes, a little inspiring. It isn’t all syrupy clichés, and heart string pulling. It works because the performances by Zack Gottsagen, a newcomer with Down Syndrome, and Shia LeBeouf, in the two leads of this buddy comedy, who together, makes the avoid some of the usual pitfalls of this kind of movie. It’s still clichéd – but they sell those clichés.

 

Gottsagen plays Zac, who has been stuck in a nursing home for two years – he has no family, and he cannot live by himself, and the state has nowhere else to put him – so he’s stuck with the old folks. All he wants is attend a wrestling school that he has seen on a VHS tape from the 1980s run by his favorite wrestler the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church). Along with his roommate (Bruce Dern, still doing his Bruce Dern thing) he engineers an escape. It isn’t long before he runs into Tyler (LeBeouf) – on the run himself from a very angry crab fisherman (John Hawkes) – who has good reason to be mad at Tyler. Tyler is on his way to Florida, and decides, because all evidence to the contrary, he’s not an irredeemably bad guy, that he cannot leave Zac by himself, so agrees to walk with him until he finds that wrestling school. Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), a young widow who works at the nursing home, is apparently the only one from there who is tasked to tracking Zac down – and you can guess where things go.

 

So this is a road movie, and a buddy movie, and in the climax, a wrestling movie where Zac gets to become the character that gives the movie its odd title. The movie knows what it is – and embraces it. Debut filmmakers Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz don’t try to reinvent anything here – and they lean heavily on clichés. And yet, the package works. It works because Gottsagen refuses to be the clichéd character we normally see when people with Down Syndrome are in a movie. He is stubborn, he can be annoying. But he’s also smart and driven. He has a goal, and he’s going to accomplish that goal, come hell or high water. His journey is not a pre-packaged one designed to make the “normal” people in the movie – and the audience – feel better about themselves, or teach them anything. And it works because LeBeouf refuses to make Tyler a cliché as well. He is a dirt bag – when we first meet him, he commits several (likely) felonies. But like Tyler, he is alone – with no family to look out for him. Alongside his work in Honey Boy – which he also wrote, and plays his own father – LeBeouf is having a career year – showing that perhaps what he should be is a character actor more than anything else. In doing that, he can be great.

 

You do have to accept more than a few cloches along the way with The Peanut Butter Falcon. And other than Zac and Tyler, there is not a single character given anything approaching depth – they are all a series of archetypes, some more insulting than others, and some given more personality than others by the cast. But the central two in the cast work – and when that happens, the movie usually works as well, as it does here.