The Hero’s Dilemma
How far can one actor take a script that largely fails his level of craft?
When an actor like Sam Elliott lands a leading role these days, the central if regrettable question that always arises is whether he can “carry” the film. Would Elliott deliver the kind of raw, breakout performance that nets him an Oscar nom? Would this be his long-awaited chance to transcend the worn-out Cowboy of his past?
On paper, Elliot’s turn in The Hero appears to be just that. He plays a character, Lee Hayfield, constructed with maybe only him in mind — an over-the-hill Western icon navigating a modern world, wrestling with his checkered past. Lee dresses in flannel shirts and skinny jeans, smokes too much weed and drinks too much whiskey. He passes out on the couch in front of the TV some nights, dreaming of onscreen redemption only to wake to the cruel sobriety he’s carved out for himself, a lonely, frail septuagenarian stuck doing BBQ sauce commercial voice-overs.
For some, Elliott’s unmistakable, leather-thick drawl will summon all of the nostalgia. You only need to hear his voice fill out the speakers in the opening scene to recall the immortal wisdom he supplied as The Stranger in The Big Lebowski. And yet Elliott embodies Lee with such casual grace that you might miss it. In an early scene with his daughter, played by Krysten Ritter, he doesn’t need to do very much speaking to bring out the emotion — his narrow, wet, gray-blue eyes do it for him. With his slender frame and full gray mane — the legendary mustache still in tact — Lee looks like an old, matted sheepdog coming in from the rain.
It makes you want reach out and hug him and shelter him, much as the crusty self-reliant Lee might turn you away, and because you soon see that he will have no trouble carrying the film, the better and more interesting question becomes whether it can carry him.
Narratively, director Brett Haley rests The Hero on a simple, tired premise. Lee gets some bad health news that forces him to consider meaning in his life and mistakes he’s made. For more than half the movie, the pancreatic cancer diagnosis freights him down as a secret — he gauges reactions from his ex-wife, daughter and friends by telling them only that he’s making another movie. Meanwhile, he inflicts the pain on himself through substances and broken promises, including a final one to his daughter because of an unexpected new love interest.
It all begs plausibility questions. Would someone really receive such awful news without telling anyone, then fall in love, then become a viral YouTube viral (a la Birdman) in one week? You get why Haley would try to stitch all the drama together at once but when Lee does reveal the diagnosis to his family and others, the tension very quickly flames out.
In the final third, Lee auditions for a part he never would have gotten had it not been for the YouTube hits only to break down in the middle of it, presumably because his secret eats him up inside. He reconciles with his daughter in the end, if tentatively, which scans as a lost opportunity. Really, we don’t learn much about their relationship other than how Lee missed out on much of her childhood and for years she blamed herself. Perhaps some things are better left unsaid but in the hands of a capable actress like Ritter, Haley may have chosen to search their relationship as a more prominent plotline.
Instead, he settles for cheap melodrama and drawn-out, cinematic trickery like dream sequences and backwards-rolling ocean waves (the meaning there, something like everything old is new again, rings trite). It makes you wonder whether you might penalize Elliott for taking on a role that largely fails his level of craft.
As a child of Sacramento and then Portland, and not the Texas plains you could mistake him for, Elliott must have found many attractive autobiographical elements in the script. Indeed, these form the film’s best moments early on — the washed-up, out-of-place Lee who pads around Los Angeles and loafs on the couch eating Chinese food with his drug dealer, played by a fun-loving Nick Offerman. The soundtrack, too, a litany of new-era jazz and reggae sounds, keeps nice time with the lazy pace at the outset.
But these only remind you of the movie’s greater unlocked potential. The obvious comparison here would be Crazy Heart, a similar-type character study for which Jeff Bridges finally received his Oscar. Crazy Heart explores the same down-and-out premise but in a far more straightforward way so that even its partial redemption feels somehow satisfying and right. By the time Elliott comes around to reconnecting with his daughter in The Hero, his self-infliction has begun bordering on self-indulgence in a way that leaves you questioning whether or not you still care.
A fairer comparison could be to 2015’s James White, starring Christopher Abbott as the title character. Abbott, best known for his role on HBO’s Girls, delivers something of a breakout performance there as well but born of unharnessed energy in contrast to Elliott’s understated style. In fact, you could argue James White digs so deep it becomes a pity party of frantic and borderline disturbing aimlessness.
And yet this illustrates the difficulty in making these kinds of character-driven movies. It’s why plot remains so crucial. As much as we crave rich, three-dimensional characters, we can only judge them by the situations they’re placed in. These two movies therefore wind up on opposite wrong sides of the spectrum: James White hits a little too close to home while The Hero doesn’t hit nearly close enough.
