Joe
Director: David Gordon Green
Talent: Nicolas Cage, Tye Sheridan, Gary Poulter, Ronnie Gene Blevins
Release Date: 25th July 2014
David Gordon Green is better at stoner comedies than gritty drama. He’s not even particularly great at stoner comedies, as connoisseurs of the genre will attest. The best work there gets done by the “red logo” spaghetti machine, not precocious indie auteurs trying to break big. Well, Green is breaking small again, and it’s with the story of Joe (Nicolas Cage), a small-town deforestation contractor with a bad temper and a heart of gold, who gets involved in the domestic tension between a young, hard-working boy from the wrong side of the tracks (Tye Sheridan) and his alcoholic father (Gary Poulter). Uniformly superb acting performances and a well-realised sense of place are hampered by Green’s insistence on doubling down on the Manichean with jarringly cartoonish peril in the final third, but Joe sticks it on acting and aesthetics alone.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
For more cinema coverage this month, check out our reviews of:
Hector and the Search for Happiness, The Rover, Pudsey The Dog: The Movie, Boyhood, The Grand Seduction, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Grand Central & Finding Vivian Maier
