Joe

Joe (2013)

Where our children turn when their parents let them down is one of the most troubling areas for fact and fiction both. Nicolas Cage's checkered career doesn't diminish his strong, heartfelt performance here as Joe, leading a group of workers in the deep woods of some Deep South state doing illegal tree killing. But that's just backdrop, because a teenager, Gary, comes along looking for work, seemingly just from some patch of these rural woods or one of the little backwards towns nearby.

Joe has issues with violence and alcohol, but he's a truly good person deep down below all the conflicts and bad judgments, and he learns that Gary has an abusive father and troubled family. And he gradually gets involved. As this intersection grows, we learn more about Joe's world in the town, about some other guys who have it out for him, and about his sense of honor. It's that kind of world where government of all kinds, including the police, is considered unnecessary to the point of being bad, and instead people have a kind of independence that is sometimes admirable and sometimes pure belligerence.

That's the part of the movie I liked much more than I expected, and was what I took away above all—the portrayal of a kind of life and a kind of people, told with an odd kind of honesty that works.

It doesn't just reside there, however. The plot becomes highly dramatic, even sensational, as some of the shifty characters get motivated to get really violent. There is even a point when it gets so hairy for Joe he does something unthinkable until now—he calls the cops. You'll see, it's an odd turning point. So this vengeance and violence make the plot have teeth, I suppose, and it's fine, but I actually sense another movie that didn't get made here that was toned down two steps and had all these elements and yet kept the focus on the real grit.

And there's Gary, who is a pretty decent kid somehow (his father is about as bad as fathers can get, but his mom had some influence, I guess). We can finally see how a kid can escape a family horror and move on, while growing up and becoming a decent person, maybe another Joe, which oddly enough the world needs. It's worth watching just for all these things. Give it twenty minutes to develop, and it'll click.

In the South of the USA, the foreman Joe (Nicolas Cage) works with his black crew poisoning trees for the farmers to clean the field. Joe has a trauma, since he spent almost three years in prison for assaulting an abusive police officer. As the result, he has troubles with the police and he is emotionally detached from people. He spends most of his time drinking and smoking to control his nerves or with a whore and his dog. When the strong fifteen year-old Gary (Tye Sheridan) looks for a job with Joe, he notes that the teenager is a hard-worker and befriends him. But he also realizes that his abusive alcoholic father G-Daawg (Gary Poulter) is a scumbag. When G-Daawg associates to the also scum Willie-Russell (Ronnie Gene Blevins), he crosses a line with no point of return and Joe decides to protect Gary and his family.

"Joe" is a low-budget movie with magnificent performance of the uneven Nicolas Cage in his best role in the last films. The dramatic and realistic story of redemption of a good man is crude and never corny. The excellent direction and performances and the original screenplay keep the attention of the viewer until the very last scene. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Joe"

Joe was well-received in its American premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. David Gordon Green's film, based on Larry Brown's novel, was filmed locally in the Austin-area. The film is dark, brooding, intense and most of all depressing. The story about a local lumber foreman – Joe - who tries to rescue a 15-year-old drifter with an abusive alcoholic father is violent and disturbing and one knows from the start that there is no way for it to really end well. I found the film a little too dark and a little too slow as it moves to what seems like an inevitable bitter end. I think it could use some editing to speed the pace a bit. The acting by Nicholas Cage as the foreman and young Tye Sheridan – fresh off of his success in Mud alongside Matthew McConaughey – are excellent. In a way, it reverses the characters in Mud where Tye Sheridan's character is trying to rescue the older man; in Joe, the situation is the other way around. The film is hard to watch at times and difficult to call enjoyable, but the story is still powerful. It is difficult to imagine that such a dark film will attain much cinematic success. Green often casts locals in his film. In a sad, but perhaps appropriate corollary, the Green cast a local homeless man, Gary Poulter, to play the important role of the alcoholic father. Poulter died on the streets of Austin two months after the end of the filming. It is a powerful film, but I doubt I will ever want to watch it again.

This is for all intensive purposes a great movie, why did I give it 7 then, well it wasn't because of the acting, Nicolas Cage was great so were all the other actors. It's really dark but I don't mind dark, it's slow, but that doesn't matter as it's not meant to be a fast paced movie.

There was just something not quite 10 star in it or 9 or 8. I really liked it, I just didn't Love it.

It definitely watched like it was being read from a book and bearing in mind it was a book that made it worth every star I gave it.

Definitely worth a watch if you can handle bleak and difficult movies.

David Gordon Green, who's versatile career has swung from the sublime ('Snow Angels' & 'Undertow) to the completely absurd ('Pineapple Express' & 'Your Highness'), has swung back once again with this adaptation of Larry Brown's bleak novel, 'Joe'. The thriller follows the lives of country drifters surviving on the fringes of modern America's mid-west. The title character, played by Nicolas Cage, is a man with a troubled past and a short temper that has found a respectable - if teetering - balance in life. When he hires a young drifter, played by Tye Sheridan ('The Tree of Life' / 'Mud') as a day-laborer and tries to take the boy under his wing, that balance begins to tip when the boy's vagabond father becomes jealous of his income and his friendship with Joe. This is a film about fighting against your own nature and, though his more serious roles are often overshadowed by his over-the-top gonzo-ness, this is, by far, Cage's most subtle success to date. Don't worry though, he still gives the camera 'crazy-eyes' at least once.