Vince Gilligan is a real writer and real writers tend to love their characters. Sometimes they spend so much time living with them that they can’t always let them go. The work is done, but your creation is still talking to you, still calling you in the middle of the night.
In literature, this is no big deal. Fiction writers will return to the same characters and settings over and over again for decades and nobody flinches. In fact, their readers often love it. They trust the author to do it right.
When it comes to movies and TV though, there’s always someone who calls foul. In a world of shitty sequels, the greater the original work is–and Breaking Bad is an all-timer–the more “unnecessary” the follow-up feels. Your real auteurs are expected to say everything within a particular frame and then drop the mic. That’s part of the art of filmmaking. A great director exhausts their subject in the original work. I fuckin’ LOVE Goodfellas, but I’m sure we can all agree that nobody wants Goodfellas II. Nobody wants a movie about Henry Hill writing cookbooks and calling in to The Howard Stern Show (try to squeeze “Gimme Shelter” into THAT, Scorsese!).
In today’s media though, lines are crossed and blurred all over the place. Television looks like the movies now. Movies are serialized like television. Somewhere in there, I think there’s room for the “literary” approach.
What I’m trying to say is that I think that Gilligan, who wrote and directed this, deserves the same allowances that we give to fiction writers. He deserves to be trusted with this world and these characters. Whatever story he wants to tell with it has my attention, at least. He’s earned it and he continues to earn it with El Camino. It’s a great movie, tautly made and full of the clever turns, strongly rendered characters and visions of Albuquerque’s grimy side that made the original series stay with you afterward.
It’s the Ballad of Jesse Pinkman. It’s the story of a wounded animal and how he survives. He’s seen horrible things. He’s been tortured, caged, enslaved and had a thousand holes poked in his soul. He’s no innocent, but he had our sympathies in the original series because he kept his heart while Walter White let his all but wither away.
When we last saw him, he was flying down the road, dirty, shaggy, beaten, broken, changed. Much of his past was laying dead behind him. There was temporary triumph in his survival, but uncertainty ahead. No chance at a normal life. Still in danger, even.
That’s a good ending. That’s a noir ending. That’s an ending that you can talk about.
Was a follow-up “necessary”? This is the wrong question. “Necessary” ain’t got shit to do with good or bad.
Me, I think this is a beautiful movie. This is not a mere money-grab. This is love. This is a great writer doing what he wants. I even think that the flashbacks, in which we see some favorite old characters, make sense. Gilligan makes those scenes mean more than just tossing Gummi Bears to the fans.
Jesse only has two choices here: die or abandon his old life. To do the latter, he needs to find Robert Forster, get the money together to pay him his exorbitant fee (and Forster, a man of a curious sort of integrity, won’t take a dollar less) and then disappear in some cabin way up north where it snows 363 days a year. That’s not a casual decision, even for Jesse, who’s resigned himself to never speaking to his family again and has unfinished business back home. It’s some heavy shit. It’s not easy.
It makes sense that he would reminisce. Remember some good times and some real bad times. Talk to the dead. Wish that he could go back and fix things. He’s constantly thinking about what he’s leaving behind. In this movie, Jesse is a scarred and sweaty mix of trauma and nostalgia.
And this is a movie, not just a long episode of the series. Widescreen. Stuff happening all over the frame. Kinetic. Focused on one character who wants one thing. What he wants is a fresh start. He’ll never undo the damage of the past. He’ll be haunted for the rest of his life. Gilligan makes that clear.
But he does his best. He’s desperate and scared and ragged. No friends (well, okay, he has two friends and they’re good friends, but Jesse can’t stick with them because he puts them in danger, too). He’s alone and worthless to the outside world except as a corpse or a prisoner. All he has is a little knowledge of where he can find the cash he needs and a powerful instinct to live.
Sounds like a story worth telling to me.