"Joe" (2014)

Joe Ransom (Nicholas Cage) is not a good role model. He’s not even a particularly good person. But everyone else in the world of Joe is so awful and irredeemable that Joe feels like a paragon by comparison. 

Joe is a drunk, a stunted man with a temper problem who once went to prison for assaulting a police officer. And yet, due to a terrific performance by Cage (so very much at odds with what we expect from him), Joe feels like a strangely moral center for this universe. 

The goodness of this highly broken man is brought into sharp relief when Joe meets Gary (Tye Sheridan, fresh off another unusual mentor-mentee relationship in Mud), a boy, all of 15, from a broken home. Gary’s father Wade (Gary Poulter) is a drunk who will do anything to get his hands on booze and who has all but abandoned his family to poverty. Gary lives out of a condemned house with his mother and sister, both of whom almost never speak.

Gary seeks work with Joe, who runs an operation poisoning pines that have unusable lumber. They’ve been hired out by a lumber company that wants to clear the land but can’t legally until the trees are dead. 

Gary is eager and willing to do any work to make cash for his family. He even gets his father on board for a time but he’s so lazy and unmotivated and intoxicated that Joe refuses to hire him again.  

Joe, like last year’s Prince Avalanche, represents a return to form for director David Gordon Green. Green’s recent films have been Apatow-ian comedies. By contrast, Green’s debut film George Washington was a small lyrical, Malickian film concerned with people suffering and learning against a background of beautiful natural scenery and decaying urban locales in Georgia. Joe has a lot of the same low-key, lush observance of the environments that surround people, and Green shoots numerous scenes with an almost improvisatory quality that suggests he let the camera roll to capture the rhythms of everyday speech and interaction.  

Joe’s relationship with Gary is placed in contrast to the violence Joe somehow always seems to bring with him. Joe falls into conflict with Gary’s father as he becomes protective of and paternal towards the boy. But he also brings the low-lives he’s had run-ins with at the bars he frequents. There’s the quiet grace of the land and Joe and Gary’s relationship, and the violence and destruction at odds with it that Joe is both a purveyor of and savior from. Joe and Gary’s story feels small against this backdrop but it matters; a small instance of connection in a world that seems intent on resigned declination. 

Grade: A-