“Twenty years ago,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Robin Williams approached director Gus Van Sant about developing irreverent Portland cartoonist John Callahan’s memoir, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, with the intention of playing its author—a quadriplegic skirt-chaser, wheelchair racer, born-again bastard, tactlessly un-P.C. disaster—in what sounds like it would have been a wild, Charlie Kaufman-esque pinwheel of a movie. Instead, we get super-chameleon Joaquin Phoenix in the role, and though the end result couldn’t be more different, it’s a keeper in any case.”
“A return for Gus Van Sant to the loose-limbed chronicles of outsider existences in Portland, Oregon that first put him on the map, like Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, this unwieldy but consistently enjoyable portrait of paraplegic local hero John Callahan is notable for its generosity of spirit and gentleness,” finds David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. “For want of a better word, it's disarmingly chill.”
“There are plenty of great moments,” grants Jordan Hoffman in the Guardian, “but they jump out amid a jumble of strangely flat scenes. This doesn’t feel like the work of a great master; it’s a discordant brew that just doesn’t blend right. There’s some irony in this, considering that the story, based on cartoonist John Callahan’s autobiography, is largely about following the clearly demarcated twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Sure, it’s a road that is frequently bumpy, but that shouldn’t allow for a film that is acerbic one moment and maudlin the next. Everyone in this extraordinary cast is doing something interesting, but the film just doesn’t seem to be headed anywhere.”
But for Screen’s Tim Grierson, “the movie radiates considerable compassion, sensitively addressing issues including addiction, recovery, and forgiveness. . . . Spanning more than a decade, and sometimes somersaulting around chronologically, the film fashions a mosaic-like portrait,” and “the cumulative effect has its own kind of sneaky power, presenting us with snapshots of a life rather than presumptuously assuming that a straightforward narrative arc would somehow be more illuminating.”
“Van Sant’s fragmentary approach reveals substantial investment in Callahan’s appeal, even as it has a distancing effect by establishing the outcome of his struggles while he’s in the midst of them,” writes IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “The movie falls short of deep insights, but its most prominent qualities—scrappy, ephemeral, a little bit lewd—mirror the chief attributes of Callahan’s endearing work.”
At the Playlist, Gregory Ellwood suggests that, since his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), Phoenix “has basically delivered one acting master class after another. And now he follows up his Cannes winning performance in You Were Never Really Here with a profoundly impressive turn . . . If only the rest of the film could completely live up to his performance.” Especially notable here are Ellwood’s ultra-succinct summations of the work from the other cast members, all slipped between parentheses: “Jack Black, fantastic”; “Jonah Hill, committed”; “Beth Ditto, more please”; “Mark Webber, barely there”; “Udo Kier, smart casting”; “Kim Gordon, works”; “Rooney Mara, charming”; “Tony Greenhand, not bad for a celebrity joint roller”; and “Carrie Brownstein, good.”
More on Don’t Worry from Steve Pond at TheWrap: “You can consider this a partial rebound from The Sea of Trees, while still wishing that [Van Sant] could have come back all the way.”
Don’t Worry is one of the films Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes discuss on today’s Film Comment Podcast (36’42”).
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