Lean on Pete review: coming-of-age story with a surprising depth of feeling
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The two of them have shifted around a lot – Charley’s mother, we gather, took off long ago – leaving Charley, who is athletic but small for his age, without a firm sense of his place in the world. His need to belong leads him to the local racetrack, where he gets an unofficial job helping out a curmudgeonly horse trainer named Dell (played by Steve Buscemi, who is very funny in spots, especially when railing against shopping malls).
As Charley quickly learns, the racing subculture has its own tough realities. Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny), a jockey who works with Dell, speaks frankly of her unpleasant experiences with other male employers. She and Dell agree that there is no room in the business for sentimentality about horses, who are sent off to meet their ultimate fate in Mexico when they cease to earn their keep.
That’s the future that awaits Lean On Pete, an ageing quarterhorse Charley takes a shine to. When an abrupt turn of events takes Ray out of the picture, Charley makes the reckless choice to abscond with Pete and head for Wyoming, where he hopes to reunite with an aunt he hasn’t seen in years.
This is a familiar sort of premise for a coming-of-age story, each stage of the journey contributing to Charley’s moral education. There are mythic echoes too, especially when Charlie travels beyond the city into the Western landscape. But Haigh handles the implications with tact and restraint, refusing sentimentality on the one hand and easy cynicism on the other. Repeatedly, Charley encounters both the kindness of strangers and their selfishness and cruelty, learning that most people are capable of both, himself included.
At the heart of the story is Pete, but here especially the film makes a point of hard-headed realism: his screen time is limited, and there is no suggestion, as far as we’re concerned, that he is anything more than an ordinary horse. In Charley’s eyes he is a symbol of innocence that needs protecting – but this innocence is fundamentally Charley’s own, projected onto his companion.
Article source: http://smh.com.au/act-news/police-investigating-apartment-fire-in-lyneham-20170126-gtz3a4.html
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