At the outset of the mannered and gimmicky and ultimately off-putting “He Went That Way,” we get a title card saying, “This really (mostly happened),” so let’s dive into the true story stuff, which you can read about in a Sun-Times article by Stefano Esposito that is frankly more fascinating than this fictionalized and heavily stylized telling of the tale.
In 1964, Evanston native Dave Pitts was traveling across the country with a famous companion: Spanky, an ice-skating chimpanzee who had appeared on national TV shows and was a star in the Ice Capades. Pitts picked up a 19-year-old hitchhiker for a three-day ride, not knowing at the time his passenger was a serial killer.
That’s admittedly juicy material for a quirky, mid-century style indie film, with the acclaimed Australian cinematographer Jeffrey Darling making his feature debut, working from a screenplay by Evan M. Wiener, adapting the book “Luke Karamazov” by Conrad Hillberry. (Darling died in a surfing accident shortly after principal photography was completed.) Unfortunately, “He Went That Way” never finds a steady tone, veers off into some bizarre subplots and features two surprisingly underwhelming performances from the talented lead duo.
Set in the summer of 1964, the story kicks off with an in medias res development involving a dead body and then flashes back a few weeks earlier. Zachary Quinto’s Jim Goodwin is driving his rickety old van through Death Valley when he picks up Jacob Elordi’s Bobby, a lanky and movie star-handsome stranger who is clearly trouble you can spot from a mile down the road — unless you’re the clueless and socially awkward Jim. Bobby claims he’s an Air Force veteran who’s been roaming America and is now trying to reunite with his girlfriend in Milwaukee and Jim is driving to Chicago, so off we go on a road-trip movie heavy with symbolism about the uncertainty of America in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, with the Vietnam War and social protests soon to be looming large in the American consciousness.
At first, Bobby doesn’t notice there’s a chimpanzee in the back of the van (he must be hard of smelling, to quote “Seinfeld”), but he’s thrilled when he learns that’s no ordinary chimp, that’s Spanky, the famous performing chimp from TV. Bobby soon reveals himself to be a crazed killer, robbing Jim of his money and jewelry — and yet the journey continues, in large part because Jim is afraid of what Bobby will do to poor Spanky if Jim escapes.
Poor Spanky. That’s the thing of it. Played by an actor in motion capture (with some puppetry as well), the chimp never really seems like an actual chimp. Also, there’s something terribly sad about the whole idea of a chimp who was taken from West Africa, forced to train for hundreds of hours, and turned into a costumed performer who is now spending most of its life in a small cage in the back of a van. There’s little doubt Jim cares deeply about Spanky, but Spanky never had a say in the matter.
Zachary Quinto affects some kind of Midwestern accent and delivers rather icy and distant work as Jim, while Jacob Elordi, who was so electric in “Priscilla” and “Saltburn,” goes WAY over the top, as if he had watched “Rebel Without a Cause” a dozen times and then decided to turn up the James Dean impersonation to an 11. “He Went That Way” ends as it began: with a series of self-conscious and eccentric developments that feel inauthentic and forced.
