The Peanut Butter Falcon (Roadside Attractions, Armory Films, Endeavor Content, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last week, from July 23 through 29, my husband Charles and I went on vacation in Martinez, California to visit Charles’s mother Edi. I like to say I’m one of the few males on the planet who genuinely likes his mother-in-law. Edi has a Netflix connection, which Charles and I don’t, and between that and an unexpected movie event at the Campbell Playhouse in Martinez Charles and I got to see four movies that would have otherwise eluded us. On July 23 we got to watch The Peanut Butter Falcon, a quite remarkable movie that was one of Edi’s favorites. It came about, according to a “Trivia” entry on its imdb.com page, when “the directors [Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz] met Zack Gottsagen at a camp for disabled and non-disabled people and he expressed his desire to be a movie star. So the directors wrote the script around him and Zack’s hopes and dreams that bled into the script and people they knew who would allow them to film for free and without permits.” Gottesagen, a real-life person with Down’s Syndrome, plays Zak, a 20-year-old man with Down’s Syndrome who’s in an “assisted living” facility but is determined to get out and become a professional wrestler. He’s been encouraged in this ambition by an ancient VHS tape he watches incessantly featuring a former professional wrestler called “Salt Water Redneck” (Thomas Haden Church) promoting his wrestling school in Ayden, North Carolina. Zak is determined to make it from Manteo, North Carolina to Ayden, and he’s taken under the wing of Tyler (Shia LaBeouf, top-billed), who’s on the run from two other lobster fishermen who accuse him (accurately) of stealing their traps.

Along the way they meet Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), who’s a volunteer at the home where Zak was living when the film started. She’s sent out after Zak to bring him back to the home, but once she tracks him down she decides to stay with Zak and Tyler (is it at all surprising that she also falls in love with Tyler?) and join them in their quest. Zak’s roommate at the home was Carl – played by Bruce Dern, who’d previously made his film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) alongside Johnson’s grandmother, ‘Tippi’ Hedren; had appeared in Smile (1975) and Mulholland Falls (1996) with Johnson’s mother, Melanie Griffith; and had also acted in Django Unchained (2012) with her dad, Don Johnson. (Just in case you didn’t believe Hollywood was an incestuous place … ) When they finally get to Ayden, “Salt Water Redneck” turns out to be a burned-out and bitter old guy named Clint, and he says he closed his wrestling school a decade before. (This explains why the tape promoting it had been on such a retro format as VHS.) Clint also explains that the so-called “atomic throw” that had particularly impressed Zak – in which he grabbed his opponent with one hand and threw him out of the ring – was faked for the video. Zak gets a wrestling bout with an opponent who’s supposed to have agreed to throw the match, but the other wrestler double-crosses him and Zak appears done for when he finally masters the “atomic throw” and wins. The Peanut Butter Falcon (the title comes from the nom de wrestle Zak adopts) isn’t exactly the freshest premise for a movie – watching it after the 1927 film West Point made that all too clear – but it’s told with such sensitivity and charm it became the highest-grossing independent film of 2019 and won an award from the Ruderman Family Foundation for its accurate portrayal of a character with a disability. It also benefits from a quite well selected set of songs, including three gospel numbers from the Staples Singers (“Freedom Highway,” “This Train” and “Uncloudy Day”) as well as other well-picked slices of Americana. If there’d been a soundtrack CD from this film it would have been as great a listening experience as the one from O Brother, Where Art Thou?