The Master is Back –
July 6, 2018 – A Gus Van Sant film has moments of strange wonder when those at the fringes — pill-poppers, boozers, gay hustlers and a genius janitor — find communion amid the souls of troubled others. The director roams the broken places, and his portrayals of self-destruction and addiction are disturbing, comical, intimate and not always redemptive. His new film, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot,” is based on the life of John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix), an alcoholic turned paraplegic by a car accident. Callahan became an irreverent cartoonist, a wheelchair-bound iconoclast who joins Alcoholics Anonymous and enters a world of wisecracks, pain, reflection and guilt, where a man must confront his shortcomings and sobriety is in endless struggle with the craving for a drink.
