Ride The Eagle
A meditative comedy, with a huge but largely misspent cast, nevertheless offers an entertaining reprieve from the day-to-day.
Leif (Jake Johnson) is a going-nowhere musician, playing bongos in a band composed of people 20 years younger than him, and living in a small studio cabin set up on another man’s land. When his mother, Honey (Susan Sarandon), dies, Leif discovers that she has left him the cabin they used to live in; but conditionally. To get the cabin, Leif has to complete a list of tasks she has set out for him. Travelling to the cabin, he has to set about learning the lessons his mother never got the chance to teach him, from rekindling old romances, to learning to ‘be the predator’ and focus on his own love of music.
Jake Johnson picks really interesting films when he isn’t swanning around as mainstream comedic sidekicks. Some of his work in lower budget flicks is tremendous, and here too we get to see a softer, more nuanced and dramatic performance from the man. That being said, the film is still very funny, and Johnson’s work stands out as the most comically mature and engaging by far. Some of the other characters and actors don’t fare quite as well. While Sarandon is quite touching in her role, JK Simmons is saddled with some truly cringeworthy dialogue disguised as humor but too crass when compared with the rest of the piece.
Intriguingly, the structure of the film lends itself to a presumably very covid-safe production. All of these characters largely only interact via video, over phones or from afar without. Most of the shots are one-shots, with Sarandon and D’Arcy Carden in particular very evidently not working on the same sets as Johnson. Simmons plays a longer role throughout the piece, but with early appearances shrouded and likely a stunt-double, it seems more like Johnson’s show throughout. And honestly that’s not a bad thing.
Visually, Ride The Eagle is set in some stunning wilderness, and the big panoramas are played to great effect. So too are some of the little moments, like the fishing scene where Leif tries to prove his manliness by catching a fish with his bare hands. It’s nothing new or shocking, but it certainly provides a welcome, almost nonchalant sort of wild, back to the Earth mentality to the piece that complements the overarching narrative conclusion.
