Lean on Pete

Well this was a surprise. Once in a while a film grabs you by the emotions and even if you think you're being drawn in to some sentimental tearjerker, you can't help but be transfixed by it and sucked into the whirlpool. This film got me right in the feels. It follows young Charley who's about to lose alot. There are very good turns from Charlie Plummer as the lead and Steve Buscemi as the grumpy horse trainer. The film doesn't wallow in it's own sentimentality but rather toughens you up for the final act. Which makes it more devastating. It's perfectly paced and at times looks and feels like a gritty modern western

"I just miss him a lot. I miss him so much."

I've heard little things about this hidden gem and the great praise it got at festivals, but nothing else after that. So upon seeing this on the list of movies on a plane journey home, I gave it a try, and was instinctively blown away

You know there’s something special when your jaw drops in disbelief during an exhausting flight home.

‘Lean on Pete’ begins with a narrative that you most likely have seen before, so immediately you start noticing plot points from other movies. However, the film takes a shift into a completely new direction, nowhere near the climax, just the middle segment.

Becoming a bitter look at loneliness.

Charlie Plummer was absolutely superb. Definitely a breakout performance, as this is the first movie I've seen him and I want to see more him. His character doesn't make the smartest decisions, yet that never distracts you from the movie and you understand where he's coming from.

Steve Buscemi, Travis Fimmel, Chloë Sevigny, and Steve Zahn were all great and you bought into their characters. With the amount of screen they got, they still left a strong impression on me.

I haven’t seen any of Andrew Haigh other movies, such as ‘Weekend’ & ‘47 Years’. This is my first introduction to his movies and I want to check out more of Haigh work. Just the way he directs actors and bringing such a natural touch to the story or characters made the experience real to me. Also the cinematography was beautiful and captured the sense of being in Pacific Northwest of America. While not being visually masterful, and yet didn't need to be.

Overall rating: Check it out

I noticed that the tag line for this movie is "you can't get anywhere on your own" which is hilarious because this movie completely disproves notion completely. I didn't have a rough childhood by any stretch of the imagination but I understand what it is like to have.... disappointing.... parental role models and the final scene really resonated with me. The final ten minutes are extremely gratifying in that the director didn't ruin the spirit of the film (go back to the first line of this review). Charlie Plummer has a bright future ahead of him.

[spoiler] It doesn't affect the film but did anyone get the sense that his Aunt was really his mother? Either way I am glad that they didn't have her come in and "save" him. [/spoiler]

A little slow at times but an emotional story and some great performances make this great.

The over-long first act is forgivable thanks to the presence of Steve Buscemi and Chloë Sevigny, though it does make the road trip half of the film drag slightly. Still, this heartbreaking and true tale that elicited a tear at the end is worth watching for the beauty of the cinematography and the lead actor.

I enjoyed the film, but it's not quite the boy and his horse movie I expected. So, despite the racehorse being given prominence in the title, don't go in expecting another Seabiscuit. This is something far more subtle, sad, and played out in a very low-key style.

Decent enough, but not a patch on Haigh's previous work

15-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) lives with his father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), who is drinking himself into an early grave. Finding work caring for an aging race horse named Lean on Pete, Charley is devastated when he learns that Pete's owner, Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), is planning to slaughter the animal. Determined to save his friend, Charley steals Pete, and the two set out on an odyssey across the modern American frontier.

Fans of writer/director Andrew Haigh will know his unassailable talent for what one might label unsentimental emotionalism; his films deal with intensely emotional situations without lapsing into Speilbergian fawnishness. And, although compared to the excellent Weekend (2011), and the masterful 45 Years (2015), Lean on Pete is a touch melodramatic, Haigh's talent for allowing character and theme to rise organically to the surface through quiet moments of introspection is still very much to the fore. So why not a higher score? Adapted from Willy Vlautin's 2010 novel of the same name, the biggest problem with the film is that things are laid on too thick; Charley is very much a Job figure, and suffers such a litany of misfortunes that one fully expects him to be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Similarly, the pseudo-allegorical nature of the characters he encounters is too on-the-nose for the realistic milieu Haigh has crafted. Part state-of-the-nation address, part bildungsroman, it's worth a look, but is ultimately lacking a satisfying thematic through-line.