Don’t Worry‘s a dark comedy that at times cleaves too close to the standard “this is a thing that happened” biopic format in lieu of a more satisfying plot structure. Thus is the dilemma and the curse of biography. The anti-hero, John Callahan, does a lovely job of cracking stereotypes of disability without going back to the poison well of schmaltz or punking the audience with dream sequences where he can walk again (looking at you Eddie Redmayne). People with disabilities are depicted as flawed, sexual beings, capable of having blind spots, biases, and unhealthy obsessions, basically like everyone else. Callahan’s comics come to life on screen and Phoenix’s delivery of Callahan’s droll quips makes him sympathetic, Odyssean, and compelling on screen. I didn’t need all 12 steps of the program to understand how important alcoholism was to the arc of Callahan’s life, but Gus Van-Saint (director of Good Will Hunting and Milk) certainly seemed to think differently.
My wife is off on her final trip of the summer before our jobs start again at the beginning of next month. This is the last movie she wanted to see together before our ten days apart. I’ve been really excited to write about this movie because it gives me a chance to talk about how amazing Joaquin Phoenix’s year in the movies has and will be. Lynne Ramsay’s brutal and grisly contribution to the hitman genre, You Were Never Really Here (2018), is an action film that doesn’t treat you like you’re stupid. At times it transcended into the truly exquisite, as with the audio from the opening scene, a casual conversation on the kitchen floor, and its patient and well-deserved conclusion. As with all movies that you’re coming to after their theatrical release, some of the trailers are not great and others give away too much, so I found the one from the American theatrical release that we were seeing in theaters that’s really good. You Were Never Really Here has got to be up there with Flower and Thoroughbreds as one of my favorite films of the year.
In Phoenix’s last appearance on screen, he played a hitman in a darkly funny drama replete with graphic violence and pedophilia and sexual assault. Don’t Worry showed the full range of Phoenix’s physicality, his ability to morph and shed bulk. He transformed his hulking dad-bod into the lithe, thin sweet-talker John Callahan. So much of this film is about the permutational nature of desire.
(Wife’s point:) Not only does Don’t Worry depict the sexuality of people with disabilities, but even more so romantic desire in the film seems to manifest from one’s ability to maintain a healthy relationship with the self. John’s success with women arises out of his innate charm which doesn’t become evident until he is sober. Early on when we see him on the beach with a half-drunk bottle of tequila, he fumbles a conversation with a woman, not because he’s ugly or dorky or shy, but because he’s drunk. Ditto the woman at the party who disappears while he’s gone to the bathroom (to spike his beer with whiskey). It’s only once he’s found his sobriety that he’s able to communicate with and relate to women in a way that they find attractive. His disability does not contribute to or prevent his romantic relationships, as is so often the case in Hollywood (also here and here and here). The film depicts every arrangement of able-bodied and disabled pairings: from John and his friend dancing in the park in their wheelchairs, to his surprising reintroduction to sex with the orderly in what I’m told is an extremely unethical but very funny scene. Possibly where Don’t Worry works best is in its choices to tell stories of desire honestly and fully.
The way in which cameos are deployed in this film is really clever. You never meet anyone, as in Dickens, just once, and the second time you see them everything about you has changed. Dexter is played masterfully bittersweet by Jack Black. Slater Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein makes her second appearance on the big screen this summer (after her cameo in Tag), and gives a complex and subtle performance. Her unwillingness to come to the aid of an unusually independent John seems pretty callous at first–she seems to represent the inanity of the welfare system when she informs him that his mild success as a cartoonist might actually lead to a cut to his benefits–until his bottle of booze slips from his hands, and it becomes clear that the only reason he’s caught out in the rain in the first place is because he has a drinking problem, which she is reluctant to enable. Rooney Mara’s character, Annu, provides what feels like the biggest pushback to some of the rough edges of Callahan’s humor: while he’s complaining about a personal ad, she calls him behind the times.
By the way, the film does a good job of apologizing his jokes with analysis (“What could be more frightening to readers of Hustler than a woman who doesn’t need a man?”), so that what appears at first (and maybe second) blush as homophobic at least feels smarter and more pointed than that. The real Callahan seemed to have been less a PC-troll and more a humorist with a dark sensibility whose mind wandered into spaces and communities previously gone unexplored in that form: mental illness, disability, poverty, sexuality. (This statement is without any historical context, so I’m almost certain what I just said must be reductive and wrong.)
We’d listened to Terry Gross’s interview with the John Callahan that this past week to prepare for the film. On the Media‘s episode on the outsized prominence of Alcoholics Anonymous in pop culture is required reading for this movie. It outlines the comforting allure of following the structure of an abysmally ineffective 12-Step Program. But it also provides you as a viewer with a means of reading the film through the eyes of its possible intended audience. The “higher power” of the film is a little schmaltzy at times, but John’s (and others’) reluctance to buy into a traditional, conventional idea of a higher being spins a fresh variation on an otherwise tired theme. There are scenes and conversations, the forgiveness and amends steps, that feel like they drag on for way too long in the film and lack some of the charm and black humor of the first act. Wife suggests might be really essential to someone in the program who’s watching this movie. I chalk it up to the weakness of sticking too close to the format of the memoir. You lose the arc and symmetry (or the wild tumble, as is sometimes the case in Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson) of satisfying storytelling when your plot skeleton is restricted to the story of an actual human life.
While the 12 step program locks the story in a way that makes it hard for novelty and spontaneity, the script’s playful repetition of John’s quips gives some alternative, overlapping structure.The doubled narration throughout much of the first act is an compelling storytelling gimmick. The story is told two-fold by John in two different AA meetings, which seems confusing at first, but becomes more potent the further along you go, emphasizing the glib, rehearsed lines John throws out to protect himself from allowing himself to become too emotionally attached to his story, perhaps?
Just having seen Hearts Beat Loud in theaters this weekend with my mom, we saw the trailer for Don’t Worry again and, I have to say, it truly is a thing of beauty. Even after having seen the movie, the trailer is such a remarkably good encapsulation of the wry, dark sense of humor of Callahan and the film. Do not let the weaknesses of the biopic format dissuade you from seeing this movie, especially if you have to see it in Palo Alto, where they make you fresh popcorn upon request and have copies of the 50+ page daily newspaper for your perusal at the bar.
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