David Gordon Green’s new film Joe stars Tye Sheridan and Nicolas Cage.
Green returns to the rural South with Cage starring as an ex-con trying to keep his nose clean while running a small business. Sheridan shows up in town as part of a family of drifters. Sheridan's father is an angry drunkard, and so the teenage boy has assumed the family leadership even as his father cruelly beats him. Cage gives the boy a job and takes him under his wing. That inexorably leads to confrontation with the boy's father and the return of violent demons that haunt Cage’s character.
Green's film is at its best early when it mainly works as anthropology, studying the people of this community. Green coaxes outstanding performances out of the amateur supporting cast. The study of Sheridan's family dynamic is also highly rewarding. Rather than depicting it as a series of unbroken brutalities, Green acknowledges and retains the core of a family there - a scene in which Sheridan and his drunken father laugh and bond does little to advance the plot but is huge in building the characters. The film's visual depiction is mostly warm and dream-like (until a climax set in shadow and dark). Green’s refusal to sneer at the rural poor is again most welcome, even if the film certainly is unflinching in depicting the problems that afflict this community.
Where the film stumbles a bit is when the drama ratchets up, and there Green struggles to rein things in. The climax of the film feels a bit overheated and too disconnected from the feeling of the first 2/3 of the movie. That said, it's a worthwhile film and the first hour in particular is fascinating, beautiful, and more than worth the price of admission.
Screened in the theater.
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