SPOILER ALERT: Sentimental Just Works, In The Peanut Butter Falcon

NOTE: Maybe skip the trailer — and for that matter, this review — and just see the film? I double-dog dare ya. It’s possible that this trailer might’ve had more resonance if the song “Running For So Long (House A Home)”, which is heard during the movie’s end credits, was used for at least part of it. I could be wrong.

A few years ago, when film-folk were re-visiting Pauline Kael’s oeuvre and legacy, I read a review in which she grumbles about hating to have tears pulled out of her. I disliked her for this, maybe because I envied her absence of sentimentalism, mistaking it as a sign of a keener, more distant — and thus, by definition, per my mindset at the time, more effective, whatever that means — critical eye. Or maybe because I felt derided by Kael for my own sentimentality.

Sail on down the line…

I’ve since moved on from this appraisal, and as I get older, I find myself growing ever softer, and after sobbing over Le Choses De La Vie and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, turning to Listen Up Philip (which was a recent NYFF highlight) for fortifying self-mythologizing, then ultimately to Steppenwolf for re-appraising a dharmically solitary life, by remembering to laugh.

Watching the quirkily-titled Peanut Butter Falcon (and knowing that the scene when the origin of its title will be revealed is gonna likely be a tear-jerking moment of underdog solidarity and triumph) I found myself wanting to dislike it by way of “validly” critiquing its heartstrings-by-the-Guitar-Hero-play-along-numbers formula, in this case, a triptych merging of storylines and character arcs that should, on paper, fail as tropes:

1. A wrong side o’ the tracks poacher whose self-blame for loss of life keeps him in a mode of self-sabotage (like Don Draper’s speech to the elusive waitress in the final season of “Mad Men”).
2. A familiar, handicapable individual with an indomitable spirit, and who, you know, doesn’t act like someone from his community would normally be portrayed in films.
3. A Florence Nightingale-esque (secretly) rich girl, self-burdened with the grimmest of social work in remedy of her class-guilt and her own failure to embrace her life and decide her fate, forestalling it with the noble but big-decision-delaying job of hospice social worker and deathbed comforter.

Anyway, this road movie by way of a DIY raft built from materials donated by a blind preacher who completes the checklist for formulaic eccentric characters — adding an ecclesiastical tone, replete with a baptism scene, as do the semiotics of a miraculous catching of a fish — plays out like its own Huck ‘n Tom onna river, which the characters also reference.

Good ole’ Shia LeBeouf once again transforms (“transforms”, get it?) by way of remaining himself, into another dynamite outsider-hustler role a L’American Honey, and the entire trio of leads — Zack Gottsagen, Dakota Johnson and LeBeouf — simply kill their roles softly, with the bad-boy meets good-girl chemistry twixt LeBeouf (who could play Dave Gahan in a Depeche Mode biopic) and the natural beauty, wholesome-model-with-the-permanent-retainer-still-in-smile Johnson, emerging as the only element that had me wondering about real-life and process (in a film for which reviews will likely be burdened with such questions). It’s been a while since I’ve seen such an organically cast, well-played couple.

As the film’s ingénue-slash-anti-hero, Gottsagen blends the characteristics of his two co-stars, while also serving as an accidental Cupid, and perfectly dropping the word “family” casually into a line late in the film (not the scene from the insipid trailer), stoking one’s rooting for a happy ending, in, well, this world of stupidity and cruelty.

Suffice it to say — or rather, to ask rhetorically: Will our supervised-facility escapee make it to the promised land of his TV hero’s wrestling camp? Will our on-the-lam bad-seed find redemption, or will he pull another con, burn another bridge? Will the sleeping beauty clinging to a holding pattern find love and self-actualization?

Well, you already know the answers to these questions, and it is this film’s accomplishment that such a chronicle-of-a-happy-ending-foretold by way of formula still gives you mellow tears of joy, which sometimes, is all — indeed, exactly what you need — from a movie.

Tickets for The Peanut Butter Falcon go on sale 8/7. Info on where it’s playing can be found HERE