A small budget doesn’t mean a film can’t have big-name stars or high production values. Witness the rural Southern drama Joe, which brings Nicolas Cage back to indie films, and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, which turns the city of Detroit into an otherworldly landscape. Their low-budget aesthetic also allows these films to turn Hollywood conventions inside out.
The title character in Joe poisons trees for a living. It’s a lumber company scam: They’re allowed to cut down dying trees but not thriving ones, so Joe and his crew wield axes fitted with nozzles that turn living forests into dead zones.
This would, in most movies, make Joe a bad guy. But while he’s played by Nicolas Cage as a hard-drinking ex-con with a short fuse, in his aggression-plagued stretch of rural Texas, he counts as a model citizen: good to local hookers, to his attack dog, to his workers and to a new kid in town, Gary.
Gary (a terrific Tye Sheridan) comes to Joe asking for work for him and his dad. Joe’s persuaded, and the kid turns out to be as hard a worker as he claims. His dad, though, is a drunk who beats his son and steals from him, and has all the moral compass of a copperhead. Joe, who’s only managed to stay out of prison by tamping down his anger, starts to care what happens to the boy, and a grim, Southern Gothic fatalism takes over.
Director David Gordon Green, whose stoner-comedy Pineapple Express clicked in a big way with mainstream audiences, has made Joe in a manner calculated to re-establish his indie cred. He even recruited a homeless guy he found in a bus station, Gary Poulter, to play the abusive dad. Shortly after filming wrapped up, Poulter died during a night of heavy drinking, never knowing his scenes with Cage and Sheridan would become the beating heart of a film about a rescue. For Nicolas Cage, whose dumb, rant-for-hire projects have lately been making audiences forget how good he can be, Joe is more than a rescue — it’s a rebirth.
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