Butler's Cinema Scene

Joaquin Phoenix

“DON’T WORRY, HE WON’T GET FAR ON FOOT”  My rating: B

114 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”  a seemingly hopeless alcoholic turns his life around after a car crash leaves him a quadriplegic.

Is it churlish of me to admit that I actually prefer the first part of the film — the drunken, obnoxious, grotesquely guzzling part — over the uplifting recovery-through-AA second half?

Gus Van Sant’s latest feature is the fact-based story of John Callahan, who with the one hand he could still partly control drew some of the blackest, funniest cartoons ever printed. The film’s title, in fact, is the caption of one of his scandalous creations:  A posse of cowboys on horseback come across an empty wheelchair  in the desert. “Don’t worry,” says the sheriff in charge, “he won’t get far on foot.”

Callahan, who died in 2010  at age 51, is portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix as a reprehensible asshole who — perhaps because of his traumatic infirmity — slowly discovers his own humanity and self-worth.

Certainly his pre-accident life was nothing to be proud of.  A native of the Portland area, Callahan worked manual labor and spent every recreational hour sucking down the booze. The film suggests that at least part of his problem was that he was abandoned as a child by his mother — evidently an unmarried Roman Catholic girl who gave up her baby to the nuns.  It was a betrayal that Callahan never got over…or perhaps he was just looking for an excuse for his destructive behavior.

He was also sexually abused as a child, although the film makes no mention of that.

Without actually showing the crash, Van Sant and his co-writers (Jack Gibson and William Andrew Eatman, adapting Callahan’s memoir) depict a day of furious barhopping by Callahan and his newfound drinking buddy Dexter (Jack Black). Rarely has unfettered, dedicated, puke-your-guts-out boozing been captured with such gleeful intensity. It’s appalling, certainly, but also weirdly attractive.

Callahan wakes up in an ER where an not-particularly-sympathetic MD gives him the bad news. He’ll probably never feel anything below the neck.

After months of rehab Callahan is introduced to a motorized wheelchair…which means he can now drive himself  to the liquor store and pick up where he left off.  Granted, it’s frustrating trying to rest a bottle in the elbow of one arm while using your only mobile hand to twist off the cap…but a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.

There’s a manic, almost Keystone Kops intensity to Callahan’s use of  his motorized wheelchair, which he drives at daredevil velocity, weaving in and out of street traffic. Now and then he overturns this mini-dune buggy and must be lifted back into the seat by a passerby. Even after getting clean, it’s obvious that he needs  some sort of addiction…now speed has replaced alcohol as his drug of choice.

Stories of recovery and redemption can be agonizingly saccharine. Happily, “…He Won’t Get Far on Foot” takes a jaundiced (and, one suspects, realistic) view of 12 step programs and the people in them. Callahan’s fellow AA members know that an affliction like paralysis is an all-too-handy excuse for relapsing, and their near-universal refusal to indulge Callahan’s  whining is bracing. No pity party from these hard cases.

Two individuals are largely responsible for seeing Callahan through his ordeal.  First there’s Donnie (Jonah Hill), a flamboyant, bearded, long-haired trust fund kid who dishes tough love to his fellow alkies. Hill is nearly unrecognizable in the role; he could snag yet another Oscar nom for supporting actor.

Then there’s the Swedish flight attendant (Rooney Mara) who volunteers at Callahan’s rehab clinic and eventually becomes his girlfriend…or at least close companion. It’s not much of a role and Mara can’t do much with it.

Along the way Callahan takes up cartooning, landing a position with a local alternative paper and churning out politically insensitive (they’re a winning combo of hilarity and offensiveness) ‘toons about handicaps, death, race and other topics that most folk find decidedly unfunny.

(A classic…two hooded Klansmen are leaving the house, probably for a cross burning.  Says one: “Don’t you love it when they’re still warm from the dryer?”

And then there’d a cartoon entitled “Martin Luther King, age 13.”  It shows a boy explaining to his mother the large puddle in the middle of his bed: “I had a dream.”)

His work frequently got Callahan in trouble with his readers, but he survived numerous campaigns to have him banned from print. (Today you can buy his collected works. I suggest you do.)

| Robert W. Butler