Mark Kermode, Observer film critic 

Joe review – Nicolas Cage returns to form in deep south drama

Nicolas Cage and his director, David Gordon Green, both enjoy a revival in a brutal tale of a Texas ex-con and his protege, writes Mark Kermode
  
  

joe nicolas cage
Tye Sheridan and Nicolas Cage in Joe, a ‘sinewy but somewhat overripe’ tale of a Texan ex-con. Photograph: PR

Director David Gordon Green began his career making moodily lyrical indie-flicks that drew glowing comparisons with the work of Terrence Malick. Hailed as an artist whose eye-catching debut feature, George Washington, had the unmistakable touch of truth, Green gained notoriety as an outspoken iconoclast, deriding acclaimed actor Denzel Washington's "phony, false performance" in The Hurricane, and offensively accusing indie-darling Kevin Smith of creating "a Special Olympics for film – they just kind of lowered the standard". Yet no one would lower the bar more than Green himself when he downshifted into dirgey stoner comedies such as Pineapple Express, Your Highness and The Sitter, lowest-common-denominator fodder that left his former champions wondering what the hell they had ever seen in him.

Last year, Green returned to his low-budget roots with Prince Avalanche, a patience-testing tale of two Beckettian oddballs, which suggested that the director had lost whatever "visionary" insight he once possessed. Now, with this pungently macho adaptation of Mississippi writer Larry Brown's 1991 "grit lit" novel, we find him crawling his way back towards critical respectability, approaching, if not matching, the promise of his (overly) feted debut feature.

There's something of a career resurrection too for leading man Nicolas Cage, who won an Academy Award for his astonishingly visceral portrayal of a suicidal drunk in Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas before deciding that his time could be more profitably spent making a fiery fool of himself in the Ghost Rider movies and defiling the horror classic The Wicker Man. Like Matthew McConaughey, who signalled his "McConaissance" with return-to-roots roles in Killer Joe and Mud, Cage has the look of a man who wants to be taken seriously, and is willing to grow a beard, flaunt a paunch, and engage in deep-fried, sweaty, southern debasement to prove it.

Cage plays the eponymous Joe, a late-40s tattooed ex-con who runs a borderline-legal business poisoning trees in Texan woodlands (atmospherically photographed by Tim Orr) to facilitate the replanting of "stronger" stock. When fifteen-year-old Gary Jones (Tye Sheridan, who cut his teeth in Malick's Tree of Life) ships up in search of work, Joe takes a fatherly shine toward the battered but unbowed boy. But when Gary's drunkenly abusive father, Wade (the late Gary Poulter, a note-perfect non-professional), starts muscling in on his son's territory, Joe is increasingly forced to decide between sensible self-protection and gutsy paternalism.

Working from a script by Gary Hawkins (the former film professor with whom Green collaborated on the dramatised documentary The Rough South of Larry Brown in 2001), Green strips things back to the bone from the outset. An unfussily audacious opening shot sets out the film's thematic stall; in an extended single take, we see Gary deriding and being assaulted by his lousy father, who is in turn set upon by silhouetted thugs while the boy heads off up a lonely railroad track. It's a terrific scene-setter – superbly economical, powerfully expansive, deftly establishing both location and character.

It also suggests that, despite the movie's title, the real focus is not Joe but Gary, drawing us back toward the child's-eye perspectives of George Washington in which the largely non-professional young cast worked wonders. Having made such an impact in Mud, Sheridan proves himself more than a match for his elders, his expressive face (sorrowful eyes, defiant jaw, untamed hair) serving as a silent Greek chorus, commenting clearly upon the unfolding quasi-mythical action.

Cage, meanwhile, goes the other way. Having coasted for years on a series of exaggerated tics and caricatured physical jitters (witness the YouTube compilation Nicolas Cage Loses His Shit for proof), he retreats into a kind of brooding stillness that effectively suggests both existential exhaustion and barely repressed rage. Dialling down the histrionics (give or take a few explosive outbursts), Cage lumbers around like a wounded animal, his inner turmoil echoed by the angry barking of his faithful mutt. Indeed, such growls and yelps are a constant background drone in this dog-eat-dog world, where human conflict is cruelly played out amid the chained necks and spilled entrails of bloodied canine surrogates.

Beneath all the animalistic angst (a real brutality inflects the scenes of violence), there's an underlying metaphor about creeping sickness and strengthened rebirth; the unbendable Joe lives and toils in a poisonous world of hacking coughs and dying trees, while Gary is a whip-like stripling whose mentor observes admiringly that "you'd work in the rain, wouldn't you?" Yet whatever regenerative sympathies the film possesses are reserved entirely for its male characters. Like the thematically comparable Mud, there's little space in this boy's own story for women, who are drearily reduced to mothers, lovers, sisters and hookers, their affections and imperilments conjured solely in service of the patriarchal narrative.

The result is a sinewy if somewhat overripe taste of the south, at times self-consciously "poetic" (the voice-overs are a misstep), but generally as raw as the steaks that Cage manfully cuts from the carcass of an impaled deer, the high whiff of which seeps through every frame of the film.

• This article was amended on 28 July 2014. The reference to "Joe's drunkenly abusive father" has been corrected to read "Gary's drunkenly abusive father".

 

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