After Joaquin Phoenix, whom he finds twenty years after the sulphurous Ready for anything, it is the turn of the no less prestigious Rooney Mara and Jonah Hill to graft to the biopic project of Gus Van Sant. They will try to trace the journey of a quadriplegic cartoonist whose humorous darkness has left no one indifferent during a singular career.
Every project related to Gus Van Sant stimulates the public's schizophrenia. Victim for a few years of a crossing of the artistic desert, this does not prevent curiosity from settling and seeing, with each new film, the hope of a messianic renaissance. After wandering in the spiritual and metaphysical forest of a Sea of Trees haloed by an acid and virulent public reception, the renewal could come from this project whose classicism of the subject could serve as a creative substance for a Gus Van Sant rather gifted in this exercise of recreation of reality. Especially since the project seems to be close to the heart of the director who has been thinking about it for several decades and who approached the late Robin Williams for the lead role.
Otherwise, it is the excellent Joaquin Phoenix who will play the role of cartoonist John Callahan , known for approaching the most taboo subjects with a darkness and casualness that has earned him many rejections, especially in Portland, his hometown and who will draw his strength from drawing. Nevertheless, the roles of Rooney Mara and Jonah Hill remain unclear. The latter would be an adjuvant that will support this tortured artist and consumed by his addiction to alcohol.
In the meantime, it is possible to get acquainted with the aesthetics of Callahan through his vignettes or his delirious animated series Quads which presents the misadventures of four unlikely roommates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Kj3H2R8P0&list=PLA0AEB52DD0A1D24F
