There comes a point in David Gordon Green’s Joe where main character Joe (an excellent Nicholas Cage) starts to act as if he might be insane. Hardly restrained up to this point, the film proceeds to take two steps forward and one step backward in terms of finesse. Green, whose sharp-focused observations ultimately fail to tamp down his film’s excesses, succeeds nonetheless in portraying a Southern rural world that feels as remote to us as would the culture of an alien planet. It’s a compelling, and equally frightening world.
Essentially a story of a surrogate dad coming to a young boy’s rescue in light of his abusive real father, Joe’s well-drawn characters compensate for a screenplay that however effective in spots, occasionally teeters over the line of the unlikely. Gary (Tye Sheridan, Mud) sticks around despite an alcoholic, shiftless dad, Wade (Gary Poulter). His equally out-of-it mom and traumatized mute sister need protection and although he’s only 15, Gary aims to give it. The family occupies (barely) a condemned shack. Gary, through his straightforward perseverance, finds work for himself and his dad when he encounters Joe out in the nearby woods.
Joe runs a crew of guys whose job is to illegally poison trees to set up a speedier destruction of the forest for lumber companies to then redevelop on the cheap. Equipped with highly poisonous herbicide (“don’t let any of it get in your eyes,” Gary is warned) and a “juice hatchet,” Gary works his way into the good graces of the much older (and exclusively African American) crew. His cantankerous dad, on a slippery slope to oblivion, messes up first day on the job. Early on Gary is willing to put up with more and more of Wade’s nonsense. But when Wade starts to beat his son and rob him of his earnings from his job, Joe gets increasingly involved. A villainous Willie (a scarred Ronnie Gene Blevins), seeking an irrational revenge on Joe, adds an additional minefield for the highly volatile Joe. “What keeps me alive is restraint,” the ex-con, temperamental Joe explains. Yet the injustices he witnesses here threaten to overwhelm him. His heart of gold ultimately finds no good solutions.
Aside from the excellent turn from Cage (his best role since Bad Lieutenant, 2009), Joe contains a unique casting coup. Joe’s work crew are (quite good) non-professional actors; casting Poulter as Wade goes one step further. Green recruited an actual homeless drifter for the role. His effective performance is rendered tragic given that Poulter died since the film wrapped–an ironic victim of an accident while drunk. The torturous Texas milieu depicted by Green not only saturates and consumes every scene of the film–it permeates outside the frame of the film as well.
3.5 Backwoods Badasses (With Barking Dogs Everywhere) (out of 5 stars)