The Hero (2017)

THE HERO  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Brett Haley
    Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Nick Offerman,
    Krysten Ritter, Katharine Ross, Max Gail
In what stands to be a career-defining role, Sam Elliott plays Lee Hayden, an aging Hollywood actor who spends his days hanging out at his house in Malibu, huffing prodigious amounts of marijuana and trying to sidestep his fading career, his failure as a parent and the news that he now has terminal cancer. Lee's professional reputation rests on work he did long ago: one good big-screen movie called "The Hero", and a TV series called "Trail Drive" that lasted 13 weeks. These days if he gets work at all, it's doing commercials for barbecue sauce. Haley wrote the movie with Elliott in mind, and it's hard to imagine Lee's lines being delivered by anybody else. There are times when the script feels scripted, but Haley's direction and Elliott's performance keep the emotional give-and-take honest. An exchange toward the end between Lee and his daughter (Krysten Ritter) is a case in point. They're standing by the ocean, painfully hashing over their broken relationship. She does most of the talking, but her gaze stays fixed on the water. She hardly looks at him at all. He barely speaks, but he can't stop looking at her. Elliott plays the scene (as he does much of the movie) in tight closeup, and you don't need a lot of dialogue to see the love and aching loss in the old man's eyes. Great movie actors can do stuff like that. One of them's Sam Elliott.