El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
dir. Vince Gilligan
Rated: TV-MA
image: ©2019 Netflix
There’s a scene about half way through El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie that acts as the perfect thesis statement not only for the movie itself, but also for the 62 episodes of the television series that spawned it. I don’t mean that as a pejorative, like the film is saying awkwardly out loud what it should be expressing through theme and action. Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and the writer and director of El Camino, is too talented an artist to commit such a storytelling sin.
The scene is one of many flashbacks we get throughout this tale reacquainting us with our beloved Jesse Pinkman and chronicling what happened to him after the fateful last episode of Breaking Bad. It involves Pinkman and another character (I don’t want to spoil it, but fans of the show should know it wouldn’t be Breaking Bad without this character making at least a brief appearance) having breakfast in a diner.
The two men share a moment where the other character says Jesse is lucky because he didn’t have to wait most of his life to do something special. That moment plays as the emotional climax of the scene, and it’s very affecting, but it’s not the moment to which I’m referring.
Just a minute prior, Jesse tells a waiter to bring a full pitcher of water to the table and leave it. The waiter responds that he can’t do what Jesse requested. Now flush with cash from a recent meth cook, Jesse arrogantly thrusts money into the waiter’s hand and insists that he can, now that Jesse has paid for it.
Throughout all the violent bravado, neo-Western set pieces, and emotional pathos of Breaking Bad, it’s money – both the scarcity of and naked thirst for it – that is at the heart of Vince Gilligan’s opus. Walter White, the chemistry-teacher-cum-narcotics-kingpin who becomes a very different sort of instructor to Jesse over the course of the show, turns to meth production as a way to ensure his family’s financial security when he learns he has terminal cancer. Money, and the accumulation of it, is the sole obsession of our society (same as it ever was), and Gilligan explored that throughout Breaking Bad and continues to do so here in El Camino.
Gilligan’s meditation on the corrupting influence of money on… well, just about everything, is key. But, just as in the show, the follow up film has much more to it. We revisit, through flashback, the monster known as Todd, who made Jesse’s life a hell on earth. We experience a sequence of events between the two men that was never covered on the series, and which gives Jesse his driving action for the film –surprise, surprise: it involves Jesse’s desperate search for a hidden stash of Todd’s savings from the drug dealing business of the white supremacist organization for which Todd works.
We’re also treated to an intense standoff at high noon. Ok, it’s not so much high noon as it is the middle of the night at a welding shop after a hedonistic party with prostitutes, but it’s every bit as satisfying as any showdown in Once Upon a Time in the West. The movie is full of high-stakes moments, and they are all accompanied by a genuinely tender performance from Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman. Paul telegraphs with great nuance Jesse’s broken psyche in the aftermath of escaping slavery.
Both Paul and Gilligan do justice to the character and to Breaking Bad with El Camino. My only gripe with the film is that it doesn’t look particularly cinematic (which really stood out since I saw it in a theatrical exhibition setting). It looks – and mostly plays – like an extended episode of Breaking Bad, but when you’re talking about one of the best shows ever created, that’s hardly a complaint.
