By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Brett Haley
Cast: Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Nick Offerman, Krysten Ritter, Patrika Darbo, Frank Collison, Doug Cox and Katharine Ross.
Rating: Excellent.
Brett Haley, director of “I´ll See You in My Dreams” brings “The Hero”, a very powerful drama that delivers very good results.
The movie tells the story of Lee Hayden (Sam Elliott) an aging actor who gained fame for one film that discovers he has a terminal illness.
This indeed will change Lee´s life and know he wants to make amends with his daughter Lucy (Krysten Ritter) and in the way she will meet Charlotte (Laura Prepon) a stand up comedian that will change Lee´s life and teach him to cherish every single moment of life.
“The Hero” is a very well directed movie by Brett Haley that is about life and second chances that it can offer you.
The screenplay also written by Haley and Marc Basch was written with very good detail and both filmmakers created very good and moving characters.
Brett Haley´s directing again led to fantastic performances, specially by Sam Elliott who I think gives one of the most remarkable performances of his career on portraying a man that is trying to reconnect with his love ones before it´s too late.
The pacing of the film was very good and again this type of movies sometimes they can get in too much detail and most of the time they don´t work but this one it sure did.
I was impressed on seeing an actress like Katharine Ross in this movie, who as you know is a true legend on Hollywood bringing to life characters like Elaine Robinson in “The Graduate” and Etta Place in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. Again it was a blessing seeing her in the screen and indeed she did delivered a very good performance.
The editing of the film was very well made and the way how Haley intercut some scenes specially in the sequences where Lee is in the set of his movie was very well made and made sense at all times.
I liked the fact that they didn´t show the typical cliché moment of a dream sequence where we see the main character struggling. Here is the opposite and we see a character that despite having a terminal disease tries to enjoy as much as he can.
This film did very well in the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and I understand why since it has all the elements to succeed in a very important festival of that caliber.
“The Hero” is one of the year´s best film, with a magnificent performance by Sam Elliott and I highly recommend it.