“British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) hits the American highway for this touching, if slightly underwhelming, tale of a troubled boy who strikes up a rapport with an ailing racehorse called Lean on Pete,” begins Time Out’s Dave Calhoun. “This good-nature four-legged friend can't arrive quickly enough for fifteen-year-old Portland teen Charley (Charlie Plummer): his mum is long gone, a loving aunt is nothing but a preoccupying memory and his well-meaning but wildly erratic dad (Steve Zahn) is hardly a thoroughbred in the parent stakes.”
“Charley works as an assistant to Del, a grizzled old trainer who is played by Steve Buscemi in the sort of role that would once have gone to Burgess Meredith or Ernest Borgnine,” writes the Guardian’s Xan Brooks. “Rounding out the team is Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), a bruised, cynical jockey, periodically forced to supplement her winnings with waitress shifts at Red Lobster. One day, she says, she will have to give it up altogether. ‘There are only so many times you can fall off a horse and get up.’ Adapted from the novel by Willy Vlautin, Lean on Pete is at its potent, stirring best during the opening furlough, when it focuses on this makeshift hobo family as it criss-crosses the Pacific Northwest from one racetrack to the next.”
“Charley’s tentative stability is whipped away by his father’s sudden death,” writes Jessica Kiang for the Playlist. “Though shot with a kind of glowy restraint by DP Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, and marked by Haigh’s facility for achieving resonance through reserve, until this point the narrative has been familiar enough, and the stage would seem to be set for the kind of learning-curve American odyssey in which time-honored rite-of-passage lessons about Friendship, Loyalty and Responsibility are learned. But this is that story with all the sentimentality precision-syringed out, and what’s left is an increasingly hard-edged, occasionally harrowing journey through hardship and loss, toward destitution.”
“What Lean on Pete is not is a children’s movie, or a crowd-pleaser, or an uplifting coming-of-age story,” writes Variety’s Peter Debruge. Instead, “it’s a serious-minded, unvarnished glimpse into how it feels to be fifteen and completely alone in the world. But instead of playing that situation for sympathy, Haigh takes the Bressonian high road, adopting an austere, arm’s-length style that keeps the audience at an uncomfortable distance from the character.”
“Haigh, however, isn’t a sadist,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “and he doesn’t forget the John Steinbeck quote that Vlautin used as the epigraph for his novel: ‘It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.’ The film isn’t as punishing as it sounds. It’s slow, borrowing Kelly Reichardt’s pacing in addition to her usual milieu (Wendy and Lucy fans will be very comfortable here), but the story is propelled by its moral velocity, by the friction it finds between its characters.”
“There's not a false note in the performances,” finds David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. “Neither Sevigny's sleepy-eyed, seen-it-all detachment nor Bonnie's willingness to shrug off Del's disreputable tactics preclude her genuine, big-sisterly affection for Charley. And Buscemi, while probably nobody's idea of a grizzled horseman, imbues the foul-mouthed character with an amusing sourness and a begrudging concern for Charley that offset Del's less admirable qualities.”
Alonso Duralde at TheWrap: “When a European director makes his or her first movie in the United States, you can pretty much rely on two things: the camera’s awe at the wide-open spaces and big skies, and a downbeat story of how the Land of Opportunity so often lets its most helpless citizens fall between the cracks. So on the American Miserabilism shelf at your local shuttered video store, you can put Andrew Haigh’s powerful and poignant Lean on Pete alongside such other classics of the genre as Werner Herzog’s Stroszek and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey.”
VIDEO
More from John Bleasdale (CineVue, 2/5) and Wendy Ide in Screen, where Tom Grater tells the story of the film’s making.
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