Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018) Director Gus Van Sant
4B
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot is a biopick of quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan's (Joaquin Phoenix) battle with alcohol and disability. The movie boosts another solid performance by Phoenix, and is an improvement for director Gus Van Sant after his last film
The Sea of Trees. But this one has lots of problems, too, and they mostly fall on Van Sant who wrote, directed and co-edited the film. For starters, the movie seemed endless, not to mention a little jumbled, as so many repetitious scenes, almost all shot in unnecessarily annoying wide-angled close ups, add an undesirable, cramped element to almost all of the movie. As Phoenix is virtually in every scene and drunk for a significant part of the time, this approach to shot selection did him no favours as it tended to make some of his physical reactions seem a bit on the stagy side. In terms of narrative, Van Sant flits back and forth among Callahan's physical condition, his addiction and his offbeat, acerbic cartoons, never all that concerned with forming the parts into a whole. The cartoon sections really held my interest, though, and I wish more time had been devoted to that aspect of Callahan's life. One saving grace in the film is the performance of an almost unrecognizable Jonah Hill as John's
Alcohol Anonymous sponsor Donny whose cool, insightful support masks a man still fighting his own demons. Along with Callahan, Donny is the only other semi-whole character in the movie, and a few of his scenes with Phoenix represent about the only time that a character other than Callahan took on something approaching real feeling rather than its movie-reality counterpart. With no clear direction rising to the surface,
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot ends on an inspirational note. While not a complete disaster thanks to two fine performances, I think the movie will likely sink from sight pretty quickly.
Sidenote: For a guy who is supposed to be a quadriplegic, Phoenix's Callahan partially but clearly uses his arms late in the movie which isn't a big deal but confused the living hell out of me. If it's a mistake, it seems an exceedingly odd one. Maybe I missed some improvement in his condition, but I don't have a clue what it could have been.