[Review] ‘The Peanut Butter Falcon’
★★★½ — starring Shia LaBoeuf, Zack Gottsagen and Dakota Johnson, 2019
The Peanut Butter Falcon is the story of success, never giving up, and soaring above the limits others impose upon you. Or, maybe, it’s the story of compromise, listening to others, and learning hard lessons. It’s hard to tell. The problem with The Peanut Butter Falcon is that it can’t seem to decide for itself: is it a feel-good film or a right-in-the-feels film?
Uncommitted, The Peanut Butter Falcon occupies the awkward space in between, where audiences are left unsure if they’re supposed to laugh or cry. The film is in love with its characters, and for good reason—they’re thoughtful, generous underdogs, everything moviegoers have come to expect from a hero-protagonist. Zak (Gottsagen) is a man with Down’s syndrome who dreams of becoming a pro-wrestler—without a family, he has been unfairly dumped in a retirement home in spite of his youthful energy. Tyler (LaBoeuf) is a mourning renegade, whose mawkish misanthropy is challenged by the strange sense of compassion he feels for Zak. After Zak escapes from the retirement home with the help of some octogenarian insiders, the duo travels across state boundaries to reach a mythic wrestling school taught by Zak’s idol, the ‘Saltwater Redneck.’
In hot pursuit of the young escapee is Zak’s carer, Eleanor, whose pragmatic approach to Zak’s wellbeing unfairly paints her as an antagonist in his eyes. Dakota Johnson excels as the compassionate and witty Eleanor, although all too often her role is relegated to the back-seat. Despite her reasonable concerns for Zak’s safety among the street wrestlers of the outside world, Tyler’s frequent lectures about Zak’s autonomy forces her to reconsider her role in keeping him in the retirement home. She is vindicated only occasionally in this story, and usually tacitly, robbing her of her much-needed chance to justify herself not only to mulish Tyler but to the audience. In a way, the film which unfairly paints Tyler’s liberal, laissez-faire mode of leadership within the group as the more reasonable one, despite his evident irresponsibility.
There’s a friction at work here, between our intrinsic desire for safety and our desire for freedom and fulfilment. This is where the film does excel, in its nuance. Some of the greatest stories ever written are those in which two conflicting “right” answers are at war with one another — Antigone, Hamlet, Brave New World. But these, crucially, are tragedies — there is a distinct emotional payoff in knowing that there is no “having one’s cake and eating it, too” in Greek tragedy; it forces us to feel, and feel strongly. (Rarely is there even “having one’s cake.”)
The moral of the film, rather languidly, ends up being simply this: that one needs to have the right amount of both to do well in the world. How exactly to achieve that balance, the film doesn’t care to explain, or even to hypothecate—and this moral murkiness is only exacerbated by the love the film holds for its characters. Auntishly, the story itself seems to being willing its characters to thrive, pushing them along with convenience, coddling them from the brunt of the consequences of their actions; it loves them so greatly that it shelters them from the hardships that would teach them the lessons they ought to learn, not as people but characters with an obligation to their audience.
Not every story must be a tragedy, but it usually has to provide a sense that characters have earned whatever it is that they earn. What prevents The Peanut Butter Falcon from excelling as a great film, as opposed to merely a good one, is this narrative dearth. Feel-good or right-in-the-feels? “Neither,” says The Peanut Butter Falcon, before refusing to elaborate and driving off into the sunset in search of its own mythic Redneck wrestling school, its own intangible answers.
