Lean On Pete review: a piercing and wistful tale of one boy and his horse
Dir: Andrew Haigh; Starring: Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Travis Fimmel, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Zahn, Amy Seimetz, Thomas Mann. 15 cert, 122 mins.
“Don’t run, walk!” barks Del (Steve Buscemi), a prickly horse trainer, as his teenage assistant bolts off on an errand through a crowded stable. But 15-year-old Charley Thompson – played by Charlie Plummer, the young John Paul Getty III in All the Money in the World – isn’t the walking type.
Charley was even running when Del met him, haring through whatever small town in Oregon he and his genially deadbeat father (Travis Fimmel) had just washed up in. For Charley, running and living are indistinguishable. That’s the one thing he has in common with sharks: to stay still would be as good as dropping dead.
This is the crux of Andrew Haigh’s piercing and wistful new film, in which the British director swaps the Norfolk Broads of his Bafta-nominated 45 Years for the significantly broader American west – a hard, vast place of dreary diners, grumbling trucks, and starlit open plains.
Adapted from the 2010 novel by Willy Vlautin, in a sense Lean on Pete is a boy-and-his-animal film in the fine old tradition of Lassie Come Home and Old Yeller – and in 18-year-old Plummer, it has a lead actor who becomes a star before your eyes. But it forswears kitschy pathos for a slow-build, almost neorealist compassion for Charley and his faithful companion, the five-year-old quarter horse of the title that Del endlessly tours around the local low-stakes racing circuit.
Lean on Pete is a sprinter by breed, and when he takes off from the traps, Charley can't stop himself from slipping under the rail and dashing after him at speed. They’re kindred spirits – two knots of bony joints built for onward movement.
So when the prospect of the slaughterhouse looms, Charley frees the creature and sets off with him on a grand cross-country journey towards his kindly but half-estranged aunt – the last adult on Earth you sense he would consider trusting with either of their lives. Tellingly, Charley doesn’t ride Pete. Instead, like equals, they just clop along side by side.
What makes Charley and Pete’s bond so charming is the way it’s very carefully underplayed. The boy happily rambles to his fellow traveller at length, but there is never any sense that what he’s saying is being listened to, let alone understood. In fact, Charley’s co-workers explicitly warn him about getting too sentimental over the animal. “Don’t think of them as pets,” advises Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), a jockey who rides for Del and is privy to his some of his shadier schemes. “They’re here to race and nothing else.”
Del, meanwhile, takes an even blunter approach. “You should do something else while you can,” he warns Charley, after seeing the boy look at Pete as something more than a source of income. “I used to like horses too, you know.”
Buscemi is an old hand at stringy curmudgeons, but Del is a subtler and more complex creation than most of them: genuinely well-meaning as a mentor to Charley, he’s also, professionally speaking, a treacherous schlub. And as Charley’s father, Fimmel pulls off the same trick in reverse: he’s a plainly dreadful parent, but the genuine fondness and sense of fun the actor brings to him make him impossible to dislike.
A quick scene in which father and son eat breakfast together fleshes out their relationship with a dazzling economy of expression, from the uproarious table talk about his father’s seemingly innumerable exes (“Marlene was pretty smart for a stripper”), to the way Charley nimbly forks up the last sausage a split second before his old man can reach it.
The moment is capped with a piece of seemingly useless dating advice – “all the best woman have been waitresses,” his dad confides with a wink – which the film quietly, repeatedly goes on to suggest may in fact be a nugget of wisdom worthy of Solomon himself.
Lean on Pete might lack the emotional wallop and meticulous structure of 45 Years, or Haigh’s earlier film Weekend – much like its two dust-blown protagonists, it just keeps trotting onwards, meeting whatever scrapes and ne’er-do-wells happen to fall in its path. But it still rings with the small, revelatory details of great drama – those bright, beautifully observed moments of humanity that jump out like glints of glass in the desert.
