Film Review: FINCH (2021): A Bittersweet Movie that Explores Humanity with Obvious & Honest Sentimental Overtones

Finch Review

Finch (2021) Film Review, a movie directed by Miguel Sapochnik, and starring Tom Hanks, Caleb Landry Jones, Marie Wagenman, Laura Martinez-Cunningham, Oscar Avila, Emily Jones, and Seamus.

Finch Weinberg (Tom Hanks) is not your typical post-disaster road warrior fighting the good fight in a desert wasteland in Sapochnik’s Finch.

But Finch does live in a wasteland — or rather, beneath one. And it is a desert, from a solar flare that decimated the ozone layer. But he is a gentleman, a robotics engineer, who survived out of sheer luck while working in his underground laboratory. But those ten years of good luck are about to run out.

Freak weather patterns and super-storms force Finch out of his bunker. But fortunately, he has friends to keep him company. One friend he came upon by chance, a pooch named Goodyear (Seamus) he had rescued years earlier. And there are two by design, in fact his own: Dewey, a short mechanical go-for; and Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones), a towering automaton into which Finch downloaded a compendium of human knowledge, sacrificing a chunk of important data because of the emergency departure.

Finch is left to fill in the gap, doing his best to explain or demonstrate to Jeff, on the fly, the paradoxes of humanity. Despite all his preparations and ingenious improvisations for survival, Finch is past middle age. From the start, there are indications of Finch’s impending demise from radiation poisoning, and the clock is obviously ticking. Soon, Jeff learns of his primary purpose: to care for Goodyear when the engineer has passed on.

But this is easier said than done. Trust is on the table, and Goodyear has none of it for Jeff, who struggles with Finch’s description of the obscure concept. While stopping for a rest as they approach the Rockies, Finch has a revelation on how to engage his two companions — Goodyear’s favorite game: playing ‘fetch’ with a tennis ball. He encourages Jeff to try, and try he does, but to no avail. Whether loyal or pig-headed (likely both), Goodyear plays with Finch or not at all.

There is little exposition of the post-apocalyptic world beyond the challenges the travelers face as they make their way westward through the frontier gulag. Finch’s anecdotes include flashbacks in which he hides while foraging in a grocery store when a truck driver (Oscar Avila) steals food from a woman (Laura Martinez-Cunningham) and her daughter (Marie Wagenman). He later discovers (and immediately adopts) the pup Goodyear stowed in the daughter’s backpack. 

There are two relatively low-key narrative scenes that add some jolts of suspense and humor. Foraging for food leads their being pursued on a dark highway by a lone vehicle from which they narrowly escape; popcorn kernels pop instantly on a hubcap in the UV saturated sunlight outside a deserted small-town theatre. But these scenes are treated lightly; less-is-more, simple, quirky throwaways whose impact lingers in the memory. 

It is easy enough to guess that Finch doesn’t survive the entire journey, or even anticipate the unfolding events in this film. This is, after all, a bittersweet film suitable for family fare. But that said, even its more obvious sentimental overtones are honest ones; those passages deserve to be felt as they are meant to, even if one sees them coming. This movie reminds us that there’s nothing more human than the capacity for companionship.

Tom Hanks does another remarkable turn as the crusty-kind engineer, Finch Weinberg. His voice is gruff with age and irritation; alternately encourages and scolds Jeff; yet warm and soft when addressing Goodyear. One may recognize similarities in his performance as the upbeat executive Chuck Noland in Cast Away, in a gulag of a different sort, stranded and stripped of civilization except for flotsam. Wilson (the soccer ball) stood in for Jeff. And despite their differences, both were creations that allowed his character surmount isolation, arguably the most damning and gratifying of human needs — or, in the case of Finch, preventing the inevitable loneliness and grief of his beloved Goodyear.

Caleb Landry Jones provides the voice for Jeff, the third of the trio of travelers, whose diction improves (rather quickly) from synthesizer stutter to that of a young teen. Interestingly, Finch begins to respond to Jeff something like in kind — the son he never had, one he constructed because of his almost gentle, resigned misanthropy. Finch sits under a beach umbrella, dressed in the natty suit he bought for meeting his estranged father for the first time. Now he wears it, for the last time, as farewell to his ‘adopted’ family. He returns Jeff’s embrace as he watches his last sunset.

The blaze of Finch’s funeral pyre against the last glimmers of sunset behind the shadow of the Rockies is a quiet, solemn grandeur as Jeff and Goodyear watch in silence. Later, inside the vehicle, Goodyear’s long howls of grief have a poignant edge sharp enough to pierce the hardest heart. Fortunately, the journey for the travelers does take a turn for the better, and it turns north, following hand-scrawled, hopeful invitations from survivors.

Rating: 7/10

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