Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete takes the Yorkshire-born filmmaker to the luxuriant plains of America’s Pacific Northwest, where a fifteen-year-old boy searches for the familial comforts that have so far escaped him. Charley (Charlie Plummer) is an avid jogger, and lives with his single father Ray (Travis Fimmel); “that’s something you don’t hear about too often, a mom leaving her kid,” an observer remarks. The pair have recently moved to Portland for Ray’s work, and live together in a run-down, barren house in the suburbs. The casual cruelty of temporality dominate their lives. Charley and Ray move from place to place with scant meaningful relationships to ground themselves – Ray’s girlfriends rotate with a casual frequency; Charley’s only connection to his absent mother is one worn-down, creased photo of the two, taken when he was an small child.
That is, until he runs into the testy but well-humoured Del (Steve Buscemi), a horse trainer who trains and shuttles his racehorses back and forth from competitions across the state. Charley gets a job as Del’s stable hand, and helps him transport horses to state races, alongside the straight-talking jockey Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny). Charley’s youthful affection for the horses – particularly the old, past-his-prime racehorse called Lean On Pete – offers a good foil to the Del’s far-gone cynicism: “I feel like I wanna punch myself in the face if I ever see a horse again”. Charley’s unadulterated compassion, however, has its challenges. Unable to heed Bonnie and Del’s warnings against treating Lean on Pete as a pet – “they’re here to race, and nothing else,” Bonnie advises him – Charley faces a moral crossroads when Pete is deemed too old to race, and is set to be put down.
But Charley, reeling from another personal tragedy in his life, is determined to prevent an additional needless loss. He steals away with Pete in the night, setting off on an adventure with only the knowledge of what he wants to avoid – the death of Pete – but not what he wants to seek. The fifteen-year-old traipses around the Pacific Northwest with horse in tow, meeting strangers along the way in search of drink, food, and shelter.
Within these rural landscapes and small towns, Charley mostly runs into other men, and witnesses first-hand the rough, understated shared joy in rough-and-tumble male sociality, and the quiet traumas these adult, often white and working-class, men experience. Women stand very much in the background in this homosocial masculine landscape, but it is not an empty, thoughtless exclusion. Rather, Lean on Pete’s quiet storytelling points to how these women often shoulder the emotional excesses and unplumbed traumas of the men in their lives. One woman stands in the background of otherwise all-male dinner, and is only acknowledged when she answers brisk demands for more food, or receives abuse about her physical appearance. Charley asks her why she puts up with this treatment. “When you don’t have anywhere else to go,” she responds quietly, “you’re stuck”.
Lean on Pete‘s quiet storytelling points to how women often shoulder the emotional excesses and unplumbed traumas of the men in their lives
This is a well executed portrayal of gender-specific trauma. Haigh offers a searing cinematic dissection of the way that gender politics – and more pointedly, patriarchy – vests certain individuals (men) with greater agency that others (women), while avoiding the trap of either positioning women as purely passive subjects, or men as fully self-embodied agents. The men and women of Lean On Pete all face a certain world-weariness coupled with a lack of internal purpose, and struggle to negotiate the fiction of the self-made American dream with the fact that we are ultimately, very rarely, the genuine masters of our own lives. Class is another significant factor in their grapples with life, constraining the realm of possibilities of their existence. Del is said to work his horses “to the bone”; otherwise he will lose considerable amounts of money. An injury takes Charley’s father out of work, and he urges his fifteen-year-old son to continue stable handling in order to keep the pair financially afloat.
The meandering sense of purposelessness driving Lean on Pete’s narrative is physically embodied by the dreary and seemingly never-ending trudge of Charley’s journey across the state. His story is a notable foil to our culture’s love for fairytales of bright young men who set off on dazzling, world-defying adventures – the product of a certain fetish of youth that Mark Greif has attributed to the adult tendency to “hem in” children “with images of a transitory future freedom”.¹ In fact, the ‘pleasures’ promised by this absolute, adolescent freedom are often false, if not downright depressing. Charley is the anti-Odysseus, and his pilgrimage is the opposite of Homeric glory; the mythical beasts that Charley battles are not wayward tropical nymphs, but rather drug-dependent, abusive men; Charley himself is a teen everyman who likes jogging and football, not a high-born man of legend. While Odysseus seeks to return home, Charley seeks to create one from the scrap heap of broken relationships and unplumbed traumas that have marked his family.
Lean on Pete strikes back at the hyper-libertarian fantasy that believes human flourishing entail one’s complete release from the necessary demands of social life, structures, and personal obligations – and by doing so, the film exposes the emptiness at the heart of the American self-made man. Charley meanders across sun-soaked plains, coming and going as he pleases, and runs away from any representatives of the state who hope to refer him to child services. He could easily, in this sense, be a protagonist in a bumptious American western. But unlike the heroes in those films, Charley does not find salvation in an easily digestible victory over his foes, a singular moment of happiness that can be frozen in time to present an easy, palatable, resolution to a character’s prior surface emotional angst. Rather, he tentatively but purposefully seeks a rebuilt family, to recover a sense of normality, personal care and affection, that had previously escaped him. It is a much quieter, subtler ending than typically found in other stories of young men and their great adventures; and yet, it bears much closer resemblance to how genuine freedom – and happiness – is sustained in day-to-day life.
Mark Greif, ‘Afternoon of the Sex Children’, n+1. Spring 2006.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
