What happens in He Went That Way really did happen, more or less, in 1964, when a celebrity animal trainer, accompanied by an ice-skating chimpanzee, offered a ride to a man who had no qualms admitting he was a serial killer. It’s an odd story, the type of thing that could truly be described as “stranger than fiction,” but the problem with this movie adaptation is that it too eagerly turns the story into a road-trip comedy. Over the course of their trip across the United States, each of these eccentric men learns something valuable about the other. That isn’t inherently a problematic premise for a movie, but one does wonder if the fact that one of these men is a coldly calculating murderer might overshadow everything else here.
As written by Evan M. Wiener (adapting various accounts of the events and a novel by Conrad Hilberry that was inspired by them) and directed by the late Jeffrey Darling, the film unwisely becomes a quirky road-trip comedy, in which the “antics” on display are the murderous hitchhiker’s threats of bodily harm, both upon the animal and his trainer and upon almost anyone who annoys the more dangerous of the two men. This is a strange and absurd story, yes, especially considering that this man truly was the only survivor of a string of killings. It is not, however, one for which any sort of humor, even the wryness in this treatment, could be called appropriate.
One certainly wonders whether stars Zachary Quinto and Jacob Elordi were also unsure of the screenplay’s tone on the basis of their performances here. These are fine actors, with the younger Elordi especially on the rise as of late, but as they exist on the page, the characters are not defined much beyond their eccentricities. That might track for Jim Goodwin, the Dave Pitts-inspired animal trainer played by Quinto. After all, a stretch of the film’s end credits plays over an interview with the real Pitts, who has a knack for telling an engaging story. It doesn’t, however, seem to have been true for Larry Lee Ranes, the 19-year-old murderer described by those who knew him as quietly intense. Elordi’s Bobby Falls is anything but quiet, and his intensity here simply becomes a manic personality quirk.
The story cuts quite close to the real one, with Jim struggling to travel from the American Southwest to Chicago with his chimp friend Spanky (played by an actor wearing a prosthetic suit for reasons that are anticlimactically revealed at the last minute to be simply another weird gag) and Bobby hitching a ride after having killed another hapless victim on his streak of violence. Along the way, they have near-misses with complete strangers (a pair of young women looking for guys to flirt with) and, in one instance, Jim’s brother-in-law (Patrick J. Adams), whose fate the movie leaves open for so long that it comes across as fairly cruel.
Meanwhile, the men rub along about as well as one can expect from the details of this story, which is to say that there is friction right up to the moment the killer decides to exercise a bit of whatever passes for empathy within him. That friction, though, should not be misread as tension, since the name of the game in He Went That Way is to avoid any truly tension-driven elements of this story in favor of shallow eccentricity.
Photo courtesy of Vertical
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