Our movie correspondent immerses himself in a heart-rending drama adapted from Willy Vlautin’s novel – plus the author’s views on the celluloid version
Lean On Pete (2017)
directed by Andrew Haigh; starring Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny
There is a moment in the film Lean On Pete, adapted from Willy Vlautin’s novel of the same name, when young Charley and the Quarter Horse named Lean On Pete stand at the edge of a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of eastern Oregon high desert, with scrub brush and rugged terrain as far as the eye can see.
They’ve already been on the road for days, hungry and alone against the elements, but for some reason Charley is inspired to reassure Lean On Pete, even though all looks lost.
“It’s okay,” Charley says. “I’m gonna get us out of here. I promise.”
The viewer wants to believe Charley. The kid and the horse truly deserve a break. Then again, nothing that’s happened to that point in the story indicates a happy ending lies on the distant horizon, or even a reasonable version of survival for the boy and his stoic companion. And, as it turns out, director and co-writer Andrew Haigh isn’t about to let us off the hook.
There is a reason Haigh’s best work has been described as ‘romantic fatalism’. His movies, including widely honored 45 Years and All of Us Strangers, drain the emotions nearly dry before allowing a sliver of hope to shine through. That’s Lean On Pete all over, making for a wrenching two hours that would be tough to take if it wasn’t so honest and free from phony melodrama.
Lean On Pete is also a horse racing movie, and a very good one, especially when it comes to capturing the economically abandoned corner of the game as embodied by Portland Meadows, the Oregon track that closed its doors in December 2019.
Played by Charlie Plummer, a rising star of 17 at the time, Charley Thompson is the 15-year-old son of a ne’er-do-well single father who flees Spokane to take a flakey job in Portland.
Charley, now displaced, is a high school athlete who fills his days running through strange neighborhoods until he comes across the racetrack – called Portland Downs – and its exotic cocktail of horseflesh and rough customers.
Steve Buscemi, the crown prince of modern character actors, is a trainer named Del who hires Charley to help on a road trip to the sticks. Charley, who barely knows which end eats, meets Lean On Pete, a so-so Quarter Horse who will be running in a match race against humorless cowboys. Lean On Pete wins, they hightail it out of town, and suddenly the penniless Charley has enough pocket money to buy groceries.
Spiraling life
For a second, and hardly that, things are looking up. Then Charley’s dad is thrown through a window by a jealous husband and lands in the hospital, badly damaged and doped up on morphine. Charley is forced to dodge child services by hiding out at the track, leaving Del as the unreliable adult in his spiraling life. But at least there is Pete.
Pete gives Charley a silent companion who relies on the boy for little more than hay and a clean stall. When Charley’s father dies from his wounds and the boy’s world continues to crumble, Lean On Pete becomes his constant star. Then, when Pete loses a race and comes up limping, Del makes a deal to sell him down the line to Mexico. By then, even the inexperienced Charley recognizes code for a horse heading to slaughter.
There really was a horse named Lean On Pete – a chestnut Thoroughbred, foaled in Oregon in 2001, who was a son of the Forty Niner stallion Baquero. He was also a bit of a local celebrity, winning 11 races over parts of six seasons at Portland Meadows before he was claimed and taken to Saskatchewan, where he raced for the last time in July 2009.
“He was a horse at Portland I always won on,” said novelist Willy Vlautin, who landed in Portland in 1994. “And when I didn’t bet on him, for whatever reason, he didn’t win. The day I hit at 11-1 on him, I photo-bombed the winner’s circle picture.
“That was the day I decided I would name the novel after him if the publishers let me. I just liked the idea that everybody’s leaning on the horse – the kid for comfort, the gamblers to cash, the trainer to make money.”
Home away from home
On the side, Vlautin was front man for a rock and alt-country band called Richmond Fontaine, while Portland Meadows became his home away from home.
“I spent a lot of time there,” Vlautin said. “Wrote a couple novels there. It was like going to a more interesting library. I’d sit at a table and work on my stories, and every time I’d start getting tired or frustrated I’d look at the Form and bet a couple races.”
Vlautin describes Lean On Pete as his way of stepping back from his passionate racetrack affair by taking a cold look at the game through the eyes of an innocent newcomer.
“I had started really falling in love with the horses,” Vlautin said. “I loved seeing them every day – and I loved being around the culture of gamblers.
“One night there was a race with one of those horses who’d come in from some place without anything in the Form,” he went on. “Word got around, and there was the potential of a nice payoff. Then the race goes off, the horse breaks its leg, the jock breaks his collarbone, and everybody around me is mad at the horse for messing up their bets.
Hungover and eating donuts
“Here I was on a Monday night, hungover and eating donuts, and everyone around me is mad the horse died, just for the gambling. I think, ‘What am I doing?’”
Vlautin turned his back on the track, rented a place across town, and wrote Lean On Pete, his third novel, published in 2010.
What happened to Lean On Pete the Thoroughbred after his last race is open to speculation, most of it justifiably grim. In 2009, the Canadian horse slaughter business was a going concern, although the slaughterhouse in Neudorf, Saskatchewan, closed in February of that year.
Credit goes to Vlautin’s story for using the spectre of slaughter to trigger Charley’s desperate abduction of Lean On Pete and the theft of Del’s pickup and trailer rig, which got them only to the first serious mountain climb before dying lousy.
From there Charley and Pete are on the road, Cormac McCarthy style, encountering only occasional angels along the way to mitigate the heat, the hunger, and the cold nights spent sleeping under the stars.
While avoiding anything resembling the law, Charley is heading for Wyoming, a big place, but also the last-known address of his beloved aunt, who represents the light at the end of an increasingly dark tunnel.
Chloe Sevigny: never a bad thing
Vlautin wasn’t crazy about the movie changing one of his characters from male to female. But viewers get Chloe Sevigny in the bargain, never a bad thing. Sevigny has carried around her own spotlight since the mid-1990s, at one time branded New York’s ultimate ‘It Girl’ to go along with an Oscar nomination for Boys Don’t Cry, memorable turns in Zodiac and American Psycho, and regular roles on such TV series as Big Love and, fittingly, Portlandia. She doesn’t really look the part of a jockey, but she learned how to sit a horse, and her character at least talks the talk.
As for Buscemi, Vlautin thought the actor made the most of his time on the screen as Del, who disappears halfway through the film.
“You meet so many guys like Del in low-level horse racing that are just kind of duck-taping their way through,” Vlautin said. “He’s not a horrible guy, but he’s failed in his life’s work. Either he never had that horse, or he blew the chances with the horses he had. They’re kind of bitter, without the success that takes that weight off your back.”
Vlautin is credited as co-writer with the director, although he knew from day one it would be Haigh’s vision on the screen.
“That was the third movie made from one of my books, and working with Andrew was my favorite experience by far,” Vlautin said. “I took him to Portland Meadows and all around the Oregon fair circuit, though I don’t think he was drawn to the horse racing story as much as he was drawn to the kid.”
Haigh, a Brit, has become a master of small moments that come loaded with more than meets the eye. The racetrack scenes in Lean On Pete are shot with care, but not reverence. Del stops growling at Charley long enough to share tips that ring true to anyone who’s ever been around a racehorse, from the proper handling of lead lines to footwear.
Charley’s unbridled joy at the sight of Pete winning a match race taps into the earliest memories of anyone who still thrills to the sight of a horse in full flight. And there is a moment in the hospital when Charley quietly caresses his father’s hand that imparts in no uncertain terms how he’s still just a kid who needs some kind of home.
He finds it, after considerable loss, far from the racetrack world that briefly took Charley under its wounded wing. The viewer, though exhausted, is rewarded for hanging tough. And Lean On Pete is one racehorse that never will be forgotten.
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