The rural American South is quickly becoming the setting of choice for filmmakers looking to tell gritty, authentic stories. Last year, there was Jeff Nichols’ Mud, set in a poor Arkansas river town, and this year, HBO’s True Detective set its Southern Gothic serial killer story in rural Louisiana, drawing on the region’s spiritual and social stereotypes for atmosphere. But the locale is more than color; it functions as a shorthand for the places and people that our global economy has left behind. These are topical stories, but director David Gordon Green was way ahead of the game. A native of North Carolina, Green chronicled depressed Southern towns in his early indie films, such as George Washington and Undertow before his disappointing turn towards stoner comedies like Pineapple Express and Your Highness.
Last year’s palate-cleanser Prince Avalanche teased a return to form, but Joe’s story of fathers and sons in rural Arkansas seemed right in Green’s wheelhouse. At times in the film, Green seems to be channeling his earlier, more serious work, which always contained a strong sense of place. For Joe, he has created an authentic, insular world in the backwoods of Arkansas, where blood is currency and trust is a liability. It’s a place where the best job you can get is poisoning trees so the lumber company can legally cut them down. That’s the job Gary (Tye Sheridan), a scrappy teenager with an alcoholic father, is happy to get when he stumbles upon Joe (Nicolas Cage) and his team of unskilled laborers working in the woods.
As played by Cage, Joe is a man removed; for reasons never entirely explained (although alluded to), he has no friends, and he limits his personal relationships to a series of financial transactions: they know his name at the local bar, convenience store, and brothel. When Gary comes into his life, some latent paternal instinct kicks in, and they form a tenuous friendship, while struggling to keep each other at arm’s length. But when Gary’s drunken father starts making more trouble in his life, Joe struggles to keep his legendary temper in check, putting all three of them in danger.
It’s a conventional story, but Green’s nose for authentic performances keeps it afloat. He cast non-actors in some key roles, including Joe’s entire team of laborers and Gary’s father, Wade. The latter performance is worth lingering over. In the wrong hands, Wade would be full of clichés, a monster of alcoholic rage. But Gary Poulter, a homeless man that Green cast off the streets of Austin, never hits a false note and literally gives the performance of a lifetime. It was his first screen role, and he died just after shooting. His performance, however, lives on; his scenes, including a violent robbery that I found impossible to shake, are among the film’s best.
While Green gets great performance at the film’s margins, the central performance is more problematic. An expressionistic actor, Cage tries to dial it down for Green’s naturalistic tone, but he’s out of practice. At times, he resorts to the bug eyes and facial tics that made him the king of Internet supercuts, and his southern drawl can’t help but recall Cameron Poe from Con Air. In other words, there is far too much Cage here and not enough Joe, and it destroys Green’s attempts at realism.
It adds up to a false start for both Cage and Green, two singular cinematic voices who have drifted too far into the seas of commercialism. Joe marks their first uneasy steps back on the mainland. It’s not a great film or a necessary one, but it’s at least the kind they should be making. Now that they have had some practice, they should go make a better one.
