Hesher

You know, I kind of looked at Hesher as a primal scream towards life. Mundane Life. Lives dealing with loss. Lives dealing with bullying. Lives dealing with the throngs of aging. Lives dealing with hurt. Lives dealing agony. Lives dealing with miscommunication. 

****

Sure, Hesher is not exactly the model of healthy treatment to all the ills of life, but in some warped sense, he tries to help in his own way. I’ve never seen a character quite like Hesher before. He’s what I have read is termed an “anarchist”. Someone who operates under no sort of code of ethics or by any type of societal norms. He’s brash, often unpleasant, confrontational, explosive, unpredictable, profane, rude, crude, antagonistic, and chaotic in how he approaches things dealing with people he comes into “emotional” contact with. He sees something happening to people he might possibly care for and tries, in his own fucked up way, to lend a helping hand.  To him, Hesher sees emotionally crippled cashier, Nicole (Natalie Portman), and still-in-mourning kid, TJ (Devin Brochu) and responds by taking them to an unoccupied suburban home, pushing them both in the backyard pool, deciding to jump in himself but not before (or after) tossing whatever he can find in the pool (lawn chairs, etc). Hesher even eventually sets the diving board on fire! He then leaves them there because he says he needs to go to a doctor because his wee wee burns when he pee pees.  Yes, that’s what he does. He handles situations awkwardly and often strangely. TJ is constantly burdened by a bully named Dustin (Brendan Hill), the kind of spaz who lives to push his face into the wall or floor of the bathroom. Dustin will hock a loogie and spit it in TJ’s face as he holds him down. The anarchist that Hesher is sees the good revenge towards Dustin is to spray paint a dick on the prick’s car and eventually, one night, pour gasoline on (and in) it, setting it on fire as TJ shockingly looks on. Hesher thinks this is a way to get even but ultimately TJ is arrested for it, given a felony in congruence with what they believe is his fault for the burning of the car. Later, TJ threatens to cut off one of Dustin’s toes if he doesn’t tell him the location of a damaged car his mother lost her life in after a freak car accident. Dustin attempts to beat him up and Hesher interferes on his behalf by slicing the bully’s nose with a pair of cutters. Again, Hesher means well (in his own fucked up way), but the results are a bit off-kilter.

Hesher enters TJ’s life in a most unusual way (well, Hesher never operates in a usual way, or enters a scene in a usual way, let me tell you…) when the kid throws a brick through the window of an abandoned building, the anarchist had been squatting there.  Hesher now will need a new place to stay when a patrolling cop drives up to the abandoned building, forever ruining a sweet squatting spot. What Hesher does is infiltrate TJ’s numb existence. Not only is TJ numb, but his father, Paul (Rainn Wilson, just superb at showing the grieving widower lost in his pity) cannot escape his grief. The father and son live with grandma, Madeleine (Piper Laurie), who has reached that age where everything that happens around her is a haze, a blur, a lost cause she either misses entirely, or doesn’t quite understand due to her senility. She does have those great moments of lucidity, almost always around Hesher. There was a captivating magic to her scenes with Hesher even as he teaches her how to smoke a bong or tells her of a dirty joke involving Kermit the frog and Miss Piggy. I often wondered just why I could find anything of value involving Hesher and Madeleine because he doesn’t bite his acid tongue at any point even in conversation with her. He insists on her answering the joke with Kermit the frog and Miss Piggy regarding “what is green and slimy like bacon?” Like Madeleine would be able to answer such a joke only someone with Hesher’s twisted sense of humor would enjoy. He promises to walk with her in the morning, but before he can actually live up to it she dies. He does have a moment at the end, during her funeral, that is oddly endearing even as it relates to an explosion that left Hesher absent one nut, where he does give Madeleine that walk he promised, but it includes pushing her casket out of the funeral parlor towards the cemetery. It does bring a mourning father and son together, the three pushing the casket together. The father later awakens because of this from his aching, shaves, bathes, and shows his son that Hesher returns the car to them.

The car. The mother had died in it and TJ wants it back. Paul wanted to get rid of it. It is a reminder. TJ wanted it to remember his mother. Paul wanted it gone because it reminded him of what happened to her in it. Hesher will return it to them after the whole casket pushing incident. The whole film, TJ tries to get it back from the wrecker who finds the kid a nuisance, an annoyance. Dustin works there. Dustin berates TJ any chance he gets. The junkyard is a place TJ will continue to visit because he needs that car. He sleeps in it one night and finds himself lifted in the air when a forklift is taking the car to be crushed, TJ plummeting to the ground.

TJ is smitten with Portman’s cashier, Nicole. He watches her from a distance, and buys her an ice cream after she interrupts Dustin picking on him. Hesher knows he’s smitten, and he juxtaposes himself into their friendship by following behind her in his POS van (that has certainly seen better days), coming to her aid when she accidentally rams into the man’s car in front of her. While the motorist chews her out, Hesher calls him out as the one responsible. Because Hesher is scary (long hair, a tattoo of a hand giving the finger on his back, foul attitude, and heavy metal music (Motorhead and Metallica) blaring from his van, with plenty of cheap cigarettes shooting off clouds of smoke), the motorist takes a hike, with Nicole’s car failing to start. He seems kind enough to give her a ride, but that led to the whole backyard pool scenario explained previously. Later, TJ visits Nicole’s shitty apartment to find her banging Hesher, sending the kid into a hissy fit. The hissy fit is TJ bashing in Hesher’s van with a metal rod and willing to smack Hesher if he gets too close. So TJ lashes out all that pent up anger. Dustin, dad, Nicole, and especially Hesher; they all have driven TJ to curse and cause some destruction (plates of food from a table, Hesher’s van).

Hesher does this. He seems to be the wedgie in the asses of all the characters, but by film’s end, their 

 lives are bettered because Hesher was in them. Hesher can talk about doing four girls to Nicole, and she finds a metaphor out of this (perhaps fictional?) tale. Hesher can turn some circles in a dusty parking lot and elicit smiles from confused but amused TJ and Nicole. Hesher can spend time talking about the loss of his nut, and this can be interpreted as dealing with the loss of a mother/wife. I guess sometimes it takes unorthodox methods to free one’s self from the troubles that stifle people.

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I think the film's best moments occur between Hesher and Madeleine; in particular, the whole story about the mouse surviving a snake's attempt to eat it, soon resulting in the snake's fear of the mouse and, especially, the reaction of Hesher when Madeleine isn't there during the spat between father and son and weeps because of it. Hesher's fighting back tears while Madeleine is bemoaning missing a chance to be there for her boys during a moment of emotional crisis. It is that great moment where you realize just how good Joseph Gordon-Levitt is as an actor. To show this hardened, roughly-hewn rebel falling prey to that soft side hidden way, way deep, just great stuff from the young actor.