The Peanut Butter Falcon, More Crunchy than Smooth

The Peanut Butter Falcon is a sweet movie about good and decent people just doing what they can to keep struggling through the indecencies of life. At the center of this stoic ensemble struggle are Zak and Tyler. Among those two, it is Zak alone who dares to dream despite the awesome hurdles life puts in his way. Zak is a twenty-something down syndrome man with dreams to go to The Saltwater Redneck’s (Thomas Hayden-Church) school of wrestling, but has been placed, for inexplicable reasons, a retirement home as a ward of the state. From the get go Zak is intent on escaping, and finally with the help of his senior roommate Carl (Bruce Dern), finally does so.

While Zak has been attempting his escape, we are introduced to Tyler, a mourful soul fishing on the rivers of North Carolina, and apparently, by the way he avoids a fish and game warden is doing so without proper licensing. Of course, he is and the local crab shack refuses to buy his catch because of this and worse still, two crabbers – one of them played by the always watchable John Hawkes – give him a brutal beating to discourage him from any further apparent poaching from licensed fishermen. In retrubution, Tyler imprudently burns their crab traps and begins his own escape.

Unkown to Tyler, the on the lam Zak has been hiding in Tyler’s boat and sound asleep under cover when Tyler makes his escape. A chase ensuse until Tyler is able to find a marsh to hide his boat from the angry crab trappers, but discovers his stowaway when Zak begins to throw up. Tyler silences his stoway and they wait in quietly for the bad guys to leave. They do, leaving Tyler to confront Zak.

Zak, of course, would love to just follow Tyler, but he’s got his own problems so he tries to leave Zak behind but soon enough and before Tyler can do this, Zak is being bullied by a young boy compelling Tyler to step in and reluctantly take Zak under his wing. Tyler has only a few rules, the main one being Zak has to keep up. Zak tries to explain he has down syndrome, but like the gift Zak may not have known he needed, Tyler makes it clear that won’t wash under the circumstances.

The well worn road trip movie begins and Tyler agrees to get Zak to his wrestling school before they split up. Both written and directed by newcomers Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz who wrote this story around Zack Gottsagen after meeting him in an actors workshop amazingly avoids the standard after school special or Lifetime “dramadey” instead offering a nuanced fable, a modern day Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer or maybe just Finn and Finn Again. The chemistry between Gottsagen and LaBeouf is remarkable.

LaBeouf has long shown a talent for making those around him look good, but what is compelling about the dynamic between he and Gottsagen is that the latter has a knack for making LaBeouf look good too. The many layered textures of LaBeouf’s soulful melody is harmonized by Gottsagen’s earnest monotone with smatterings of nuance. But this isn’t Tyler’s story as much as it is Zac’s. LaBeouf is the polished back up singer to Gottsagen’s rough around the edges front man.

While on their journey to Salt Water Redneck’s school of wrestling they wind up taking along Elanor (Dakota Johnson), the care giver of the retirement home who is blamed for letting Zac get away and sent to find and return him before the retirement home is forced to report this to the state. Once she joins the journey it becomes, as Three Dog Night once sung, an old fashioned love song coming down in three point harmony.

We are already given a sense that Eleanor does care for Zac, even if she is somewhat bureaucratic about it, but once she abandons that bureaucracy it takes her little time to fit right in to the newly forming family as they make their way to fulfill Zac’s dream. Of course, there are bad guys after Tyler that must inevitably catch up with him and it is here in the film, where Zac has finally achieved his goal of learning to wrestle by Saltwater Redneck culminating in his first ever wrestling match where the film loses its steady grasp of realism and makes an odd tonal switch that is mixed with a strange magical moment for Zac while Tyler is confronted by the brutality of the bad guys.

It is the only misstep in an otherwise straight forward film of friendship, love, redemption and the audacity of dreams. The newcomers of Nilson and Schwartz were gifted some great actors besides the charming Gottsagen, the ever impressive LaBeouf and the easy going seduction of Johnson. Jon Berenthal plays a soundless memory of Tyler’s brother and still stands out. John Hawkes offers up a bad guy who looks pained to be one, and of course, from his point of view, is the guy who had $12,000 worth of equipment burned, so pained to seek out his own brand of justice.

It is nice in a cynical age to see such a story, willing to even give the villain a humanity and motive that never blurs the black and white nature of good guys and bad guys, but does so in such subtle ways that only highlight the strangeness of the final acts tonal stumble. Still, for a first film, this is a movie worth watching.