It’s an uncomfortable feeling to find oneself completely at odds with an audience in a cinema, but it happens. The recent London Film Festival screening of The Peanut Butter Falcon came complete with the two lead actors and the co-directors and their film went down a storm with a crowd of happy viewers, many of whom had learning disabilities themselves. They were delighted to see Zack Gottsagen, an actor with Down’s Syndrome, play one of the three main characters. An independently-produced comedy-drama, it won the Audience Award at South by Southwest and has been a sleeper hit in the US.
This odd-couple road movie clearly has good intentions; its directors first met Zack Gottsagen at an acting camp for young people with disabilities and he impressed them with his desire to star in a movie. They wrote the script for him and he’s by far the most impressive actor in the film. Gottsagen, who is in his thirties, plays Zak who has been abandoned by his family and forced to live in a care home for the elderly. He escapes to follow his dream of becoming a professional wrestler and is pursued by Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), a well-meaning care assistant. There then follows a series of picaresque adventures in the Deep South when Zak teams up with Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), a fisherman on the run from vengeful rivals. The Peanut Butter Falcon openly evokes Huckleberry Finn – there’s a raft, assorted riverine adventures and luscious swampy landscapes. On their travels the threesome encounter local clichéd characters such as a blind, black, evangelical preacher and a moonshine maker who gives them a jug of hooch to supplement the peanut butter which sustains them. There are boat chases, drunken bonding sessions, brushes with death, secret handshakes and lyrical open-air swimming. It's all so damn heartwarming.
The film played very well with the audience at the LFF and the American reviews have been good, so why do I feel like I’m stamping on a puppy by giving it only one star? It’s because like Rain Man, Awakenings, Forrest Gump and countless other films featuring a character with cognitive disabilities, Gottsagen plays a childlike innocent, almost a Holy Fool. Zak is 100 percent loveable and a cypher in the film’s narrative; his character’s role is to redeem Tyler, the bad boy lead and teach him to be caring and responsible. Once that’s done, sexless Zak can take a backseat to Tyler’s romance with Eleanor and we can all go home with a warm glow that we’ve cheered on a man with Down's Syndrome and we’re decent human beings too.
It’s a step forward that the directors cast an actor with disabilities rather than getting a star to "crip up". But it’s a long way from making a film which creates a complex, genuine three-dimensional portrait of life with Down’s Syndrome. For that, it would be wise to seek out the low-budget UK movie, My Feral Heart and the Irish film, Sanctuary.