Review

The Hero

Charlotte (Laura Prepon) meets her new beau, the Westerner icon Lee Hayden (Sam Elliott) through their mutual dope dealer in Brett Haley’s The Hero.
Charlotte (Laura Prepon) meets her new beau, the Westerner icon Lee Hayden (Sam Elliott) through their mutual dope dealer in Brett Haley’s The Hero.

It's easy to enjoy a Sam Elliott performance.

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Genial drug dealer Jeremy (Nick Offerman) and aging cowboy star Lee (Sam Elliott) have a long history together in Brett Haley’s The Hero, a film custom-tailored to Elliott’s onscreen persona.

Part of that may be because of the way his career evolved. He never quite achieved genuine star status. He came close -- I still remember him as the "aging" (32-year-old) title character in the 1976 cult classic Lifeguard (if you remember the film fondly, you probably shouldn't see it again) and the interior decorator summoned to England in the whacked-out horror movie The Legacy (1978), which also features Roger Daltrey's finest non-Tommy film performance.

The Hero

87 Cast: Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Nick Offerman, Krysten Ritter, Katharine Ross

Director: Brett Haley

Rating: R, for drug use, language and some sexual content

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Elliott was up for the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and if he'd gotten that, who knows? He might have become a bona fide screen icon. He had all the tools -- the lanky good looks, the laconic manner that reads as cool on screen, a better mustache than Tom Selleck and bourbon-on-gravel pipes that have caressed such catch-phrases as "The dude abides" and "Beef: It's what's for dinner."

But Elliott was spared major movie stardom, instead becoming what's euphemistically known as a "character actor." Which means that while he has had more than a few memorable scenes in his career -- you might remember him as Cher's biker boyfriend in Mask (1985) or Patrick Swayze's legendary mentor in Roadhouse -- he has also been used by directors as a kind of cinematic shorthand (think of his turn as The Stranger in the Coen Bros.' The Big Lebowski).

In recent years he has enjoyed a pretty good run of roles, as the love interest for a freshly widowed Blythe Danner in I'll See You In My Dreams (2015), as Lily Tomlin's ex in Grandma (2015) and as Mary Steenburgen's crime boss boyfriend in the 2015 season of Justified. It seems the 72-year-old Elliott has become the go-to actor when directors are looking for a credibly sexy older gentleman to pair with a seasoned lead actress.

Now Brett Haley, who directed Elliott in I'll See You in My Dreams, and co-writer Marc Basch have paid the actor the ultimate compliment by writing a film especially tailored to make use of Elliot's signal qualities of personae and voice and the good will the audience has invested in his career. Elliott is essentially playing a version of himself in The Hero, Lee Hayden, who is also an actor best known for his Western roles and sonorousness.

Maybe Lee's not as successful as Elliott, as he's not much in demand for film roles any more. We meet him in a recording studio, sounding out tag lines for a barbecue sauce commercial and patiently suffering the attentions of a producer who would like him to do one more reading. He calls his agent, who has nothing for him other than some group of Western fans who want to give him a lifetime achievement award.

(The setup is nearly identical to the one in Adam Rifkin's otherwise very different Dog Years, a shaggy comedy in which an aged, frighteningly vulnerable Burt Reynolds plays a washed-up version of himself attending a decidedly minor film festival's retrospective of his work.)

Unfortunately, Lee's doctor's office has something else for him.

And so we have the gist of it -- our hero, whose star has receded to the point that he spends most of his time smoking weed with his old co-star turned dealer Jeremy (a pleasant Nick Offerman), comes face to face with his mortality. He looks back at a life that has a lot of loose ends, including an ex-wife (Katharine Ross, Elliott's real-life spouse of 33 years) and an estranged daughter (Krysten Ritter).

Through Jeremy, Lee meets much younger Charlotte (Laura Prepon), a comedian who takes an immediate liking to him. Lee ends up taking Charlotte to the banquet where he receives his award, and -- because he's under the influence of the MDMA (Ecstasy) to which she's introduced him -- he winds up making a gesture that goes viral, spikes interest in his career and almost ruins the movie. (A similar plot device was used in the Robert De Niro vehicle The Comedian to similar underwhelming effect. Both films are better as character studies than cultural critiques.)

But it recovers, purely through the strength of Elliott's understated performance. We can believe in Lee's charisma and his loneliness. Not because Haley shows us the back of his silver-maned head while he's standing on the beach staring at the ocean (which he does a couple of times too many) but because Elliott is somehow able to convey the grim processes going on inside that head.

The Hero is a small story that's best when it stays small, when it doesn't try too hard to be poetic, when it isn't bringing up Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's smart enough to give the ball to Elliott in the end and let him convey the little victories and half measures for which Lee has to settle. And that alone is enough to make the film worthwhile.

It gives us Sam Elliott in whole, in nearly every scene.

MovieStyle on 06/30/2017

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