Matt Bomer is a beautiful man, and in most his roles, he
leans into it. As a dashing criminal on TV’s White Collar, a glamorous F. Scott
Fitzgerald creation in The Last Tycoon, or the hippie-minded, muscle-rippled
Ken in the Magic Mike films, Bomer draws you in with his astoundingly beautiful
face and then lays on the charm. And honestly, no one is complaining about
this!
So it’s unprecedented, and inherently interesting, to watch
Bomer go all the way against that type in Walking Out. As a gruff Montanan outdoorsman
pushing his teenage son to embrace and respect the natural world, Bomer gets bearded, raspy-voiced, and terse,
intolerant of what he perceives to be his son’s weaknesses. It’s a respectable
effort from Bomer, but the film’s plot is too thin of an idea to sustain a
full-length narrative, and the character development isn’t quite strong enough,
either.
The movie written and directed by Alex and Andrew Smith
(who worked off a short story by David Quammen) and picked up by IFC Films focuses
on three male generations of one family: 14-year-old David (Josh Wiggins), who
visits his father Cal (Matt Bomer), every summer in Montana, where Cal was
raised by his own father Clyde (Bill Pullman).
Cal and David’s mother split up when David was younger,
and although he lives in Texas with her most of the year, when school lets out
David heads north. But the relationship between the two is fractured and uneasy
from the beginning: Cal is late picking up David and immediately bristles at the
boy’s reliance on his cellphone; David is uncomfortable sharing a bed with his
father and frustrated with his immediate suggestion—well, dictum, really—that
they go hunting. The experience “won’t be like one of your asinine games,” Cal
says, and with his constantly brusque dismissiveness, you can understand why David
looks like every second they spend together is torture.
All in all, Walking Out is a pretty typical
boy-becomes-man story merged with another pretty typical nature-is-majestic
story. The film was shot in location in Montana, and the scenery is gorgeous (lush
forests of evergreens, snowy mountain ranges, clear blue skies) but brutal, with
constantly falling snow and harshly cold temperatures. You buy that Bomer and
Wiggins are roughing it out there, even if some of the animals (a few grizzly
bears and a deer) don’t look particularly realistic—how they move seems more
like CGI than reality.
If you can believe the outdoors element of Walking Out,
though, then you’re one step closer to grasping the lessons Cal is trying to
teach David about taking only what you need, about considering the lives of
other living beings, and about respecting things you don’t understand instead
of destroying them. Those are the lessons we see Clyde teaching Cal, and how
they pass onto David fits that whole patriarchal-legacy thing the film is going
for.
But what Walking Out suffers from is a runtime that
stretches a bare-bones narrative past its limits, and from character
development that doesn’t go far enough. There are hints of what crumbled the
relationship between Cal and David’s mother, but not enough detail. There is
barely anything said about David’s life back in Texas, aside from a joke about
brisket, and Cal himself only gets a few lines of dialogue about his own
individual personality separate from his father’s. The script focuses so much
on these interfamilial, masculine dynamics that it stumbles when it positions
its characters to stand on their own.
Nevertheless, Walking Out has an effect: Bomer is doing
something different and he and Wiggins have believable father-son chemistry;
the setting is gorgeous and desolate; and the hero’s journey narrative is
comfortingly familiar. You’ve seen practically every element of Walking Out
before, but it’ll stick with you for a little while.
RATING: 3 OUT OF 5 STARS
