The Parts You Lose is a 2019 drama about a young boy in a small North Dakota town who befriends a potentially dangerous fugitive.
In the snowy landscapes of South Dakota, Gail (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), struggles to get by while raising her two young children, Amber (Charlee Park) and Wesley (Danny Murphy), he with a severe hearing impairment. Ronnie (Scott McNairy), the children’s father, is rarely home, going where the work is, absent not just physically in Wesley’s life, but in most other ways as well. Wesley is relentlessly bullied at school and has no friends, so when he comes upon a wounded man (Aaron Paul), he having been shot while on the run from robbing a bank, he eventually befriends him, helping him heal in a nearby barn, though the law is closing in and choices must be made.
Modestly made and well acted, director Christopher Cantwell‘s quiet and somber The Parts You Lose is a small story, maybe not all that credible, but succeeds more in its ambitions than execution. We’ve been here before, echoes of Clint Eastwood‘s A Perfect World (1993) feeling a close kin to the going’s on here, with a young boy in the company of a criminal surely doomed by his actions. Like that one, this one is also held together by the work of Paul and Murphy, who share a plausible bond where fate has brought their characters into a kind of peaceful resolve of a lingering truth.
Undoubtedly, for the sake of the story, some of this gets cumbersome, weighted down by a few clichés that lay it on heavy, including the relentless, schoolwide bullying that feels forced in isolating Wesley, not to mention a father that rejects him. Either way, no matter how the boy ends up with the crook, the relationship that forms is far better handled, the two sharing enough in common as they hide out from society to make for some challenging moments.
There’s a rawness to the story and how life in this farm town works, allowing the slow pacing and simmering menace about it to build with some confidence, Cantwell using the men in Wesley’s life to shape who he becomes. We’re meant to question what defines good versus bad, not just by the circumstance a man finds themselves in but in actions that matter. This of course means some of what happens is telegraphed, Wesley learning from the unnamed man in the barn a trick or two in how to manage some of the stickier issues in his life, and while it spins in the genre ruts doing so, gives it some impact, mostly because some of the boiling points it leads to are subverted in intelligent ways.
With good work from Winstead, though limited on screen, and a tight screenplay from Darren Lemke, The Parts You Lose is an affecting little morality play that may know the landmarks of its destination well, but nonetheless works. The seemingly coy narrative use of a mostly deaf boy is used with surgical precision in shading the spaces between the three men orbiting him. It’s a light affair, not melodramatic but intimate enough to find some emotional footing, well worth a look.