Joe

Joe 88 Cast: Nicolas Cage, Tye Sheridan, Gary Poulter Director: David Gordon Green Rating: R, for violence, disturbing material, language and some strong sexual content Running time: 118 minutes

A cynic might suggest that there is a certain degree of calculation behind Joe, David Gordon Green’s latest Southern Gothic thriller.

The film in some ways echoes Green’s critically acclaimed early work George Washington (2000) and All the Real Girls (2003) and most directly Undertow, his 2004 riff on Night of the Hunter. It almost seems like Green was listening to those critics who wished for him to “return to form” after his recent forays into stoner comedy. If last year’s Prince Avalanche - a remake of the obscure Icelandic feature Either Way - signaled that DGG had at least temporarily exhausted his desire to make studio comedies (which deserve defending, though not right now), Joe feels like a kind of homecoming.

The movie’s based on a 1991 novel of the same name by Larry Brown (who, full disclosure, was a friend of mine) and whileGreen has transposed the setting from Mississippi to Texas and swapped out the title character’s van for a camper-shelled pickup, it’s almost entirely faithful to the source material. And it stars, in a bit of casting that feels (in retrospect, at least) almost too perfect, Nicolas Cage.

Cage is one of those actors who is perpetually in need of a comeback, though he’s generally a welcome screen presence who enlivens even the most ill-conceived projects. But when he’s given challenging material by a strong director, he’s much more than a sideshow or inchoate meme; he’s a really fine actor. While it seems unlikely to hold for long (Cage, after all, will be starring in the new Left Behind movie later this year), the temptation is to compare Cage’s work in this film to Matthew McConaughey’s in Mud. This is the sort of role that could change the way people think about anactor - or at least it could if that actor were anyone other than the allegedly immortal vampire Cage.

Let’s continue the Mud comparison for just a moment. Both movies also star young actor Tye Sheridan. Green is a sort of mentor figure to Mud director Jeff Nichols; he produced Nichols’ Shotgun Stories and was a couple of years ahead of him at the North Carolina School of the Arts. (If you’re the sort of person who cares about such things, note that Green and Nichols were born in Little Rock, though Green grew up in Dallas.)

And the look is similar - Tim Orr’s camerawork is brilliant, pushing through timberland, rolling on country highways, glimpsing yard art, catching the etched faces of the unfamiliar actors and nonactors Green employs in supporting roles.

Joe is grittier than Mud and likely a harder sell to mainstream audiences, but it has the same virtues of regional naturalism. It is set in a South that feels like the South, and Cage’s Joe isn’t a caricature like some of his other Southern characters have been. He plays the man with barely a trace of an accent, with a heavy reticence that impliesviolent history and potential.

The story is so simple as to be archetypal - a family of squatters, headed if not exactly led by alternately irascible and evil Wade (Gary Poulter, a homeless man with a minor acting background who died shortly after shooting this film). Wade terrorizes his negligible wife and daughter and upstart 15-year-old son Gary (Sheridan), who isn’t quite big enough to imagine himself actually committing the Oedipal chore.

Gary finds work and a protector in volatile Joe, a high-functioning alcoholic who has structured his life in such a way as to minimize his chance for exploding. The cops who know him mostly leave him alone - those who don’t generally wish they had.

Joe is as fair a man as he is a rough character, and the lessons he imparts are the solid, salty kind boys get in movies like these. Joe lets Gary drink and drive, but not too much, teaches him how to grimace like a man and focuses the boy’s attention on a life where taxes get paid and insurance policies get taken out. Gary is loyal to his damaged mother and his sister, so he declines Joe’s offer to move in, but there’s no real question about how this story is going to turn out. It’s a dark and bitter movie, relieved just a little at the end.

I might be inclined to overpraise Joe because I think it is a movie Brown would like. It’s not a puzzle box, but there is pleasure in the retelling of myth and watching Cage relax into a role that’s equal to his talent in a movie he can respect.