Nic(ole) Bettauer's dystopian road movie is most successful as a showcase for Philip Baker Hall, who's most often relegated to supporting roles and brings a heartbreaking dignity and fundamental decency to the role of Los Angeles widower Arthur Pratt, who's had the misfortune to lose everyone and everything that made life worth living.
It's 2009, and something very bad has happened. The L.A. streets are strewn with trash and the social safety net is gone: Social Security has been disassembled, rent control is a thing of the past, pensions have been abolished and Jeb Bush is president. It's a world hostile to pets — they carry plague — and plants, which "eat up all the oxygen." Pratt, a retired history professor, exhausted his savings caring for his ailing wife, and their only son died heartbreakingly young. He's preparing to commit suicide in a nearby park #&151; the last public park in L.A., soon to be redeveloped into condos — after spreading his wife's ashes around the base of a small shrub he's been tending at home in defiance of rules against keeping houseplants. As he's about to start swallowing his cache of sleeping pills, a fuzzy, squawking duckling waddles into his line of sight. He's too smitten by the ungainly orphan to leave it alone in this cruel world, so disregarding his building's no-pet policy, Pratt takes the duckling home and names it Joe. By the time it's achieved duck-size, Pratt has been evicted and formed a vague, quixotic plan to walk to the beach across a hostile, half-ruined city filled with scavengers, derelicts and hopeless fringe dwellers trying to survive in a world that simply doesn't care what happens to the old, the poor and the marginalized.
As Pratt and Joe make their way on foot through the city's unwelcoming streets, they cross paths with hostile city employees (William Rocha, Gene Hong, Ian Lockhart, Lou DiMaggio), a blind man (Bill Cobbs), an officious bus driver (Nikki Crawford), a would-be suicide (French Stewart), a genial street person (Bill Brochtrup), a Chinese delivery man (Kelvin Yu), a nail-salon employee (Amy Hill) who lets Joe swim in a pedicure bath, an unhappy little girl named Samantha (Quinby Kasch) and a rowdy pack of Halloween partiers. Writer-director Nicole Bettauer conceived the idea for this odd, downbeat buddy movie while a USC graduate student, presumably under the influence of such bittersweet classics about the relationship between lonely old people and beloved pets as UMBERTO D (1952) and HARRY AND TONTO (1974). But her thin narrative can't support the weight of its weighty underpinnings, and in the end only Hall's somber charisma and the charm of his feathered sidekick make its miserable vision of the near future worth enduring. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
