There are those painful things in life that movies rarely render in a way that truly resonates, that elevates the material above a level of facile catharsis or emotional pornography. Atrocities, life imprisonment, genocides, tax audits, terminal cancer. Yet that last one, however daunting, never goes too long without some fresh taker eager to step up to the plate and give it a whack. Most often, it seems the younger the afflicted protagonist, the better. You know how it is. Die young, leave a beautiful blah-blah-blah. You’d roll your eyes if they weren’t so full of tears.
Among the virtues of One Week, our most recent entry into this fraught subgenre, is its ability to avoid getting too bogged down in the despair of being young, hopeful and ostensibly healthy only to suddenly find out Death’s in the waiting room checking his watch. Written and directed by Michael McGowan (Saint Ralph), this decidedly quirky road movie, narrated by some anonymous literary sage (actually Campbell Scott) with a great deal of privileged knowledge, is so thoroughly infused with winky little detours into flashback and fantasy, into little anecdotes about what happened to characters met briefly en route by our hero, that it attains a welcome layer of detachment, something that helps to stave off the inert bathos that is so often the cancer of cancer movies. If only this same approach could also keep One Week from succumbing to cheap national boosterism and a palette of locations and vistas that amounted to something more than what feels like an extended advert for Canadian tourism or, worse, a telecommunications provider. (The truly lame sub-Coldplay score doesn't help.) Torontonian Ben (Joshua Jackson) sheds his everyday obligations and hits the road after getting his death sentence in part because he realizes that he never wanted to live a life of passive conformity. Yet the greatest hits itinerary of his cross-Canada trek sure feels like the same one your polyester-slacked grandparents would take, albeit in a Winnebago instead of a gorgeous old Norton.
Ben’s engage to Samantha (Liane Balaban of Last Chance Harvey, underused), a pretty actuary. He’s a failed novelist-turned schoolteacher, a guy who’s just too damned nice to really pursue his dreams with the necessary rigor. Cancer may very well extinguish his life with brutal efficiency, but it does give him the gift of gumption. He buys the motorbike on a whim. He takes up a spookily-apt proposal found inside the rim of a cup of Timmy’s and goes west on his own instead of going in for debilitating treatments. He takes photos of giant objects, stumbles upon the Stanley Cup, smokes reefer with Gord Downie—admittedly, pretty cool. He takes a horseback ride in Saskatchewan, where he most improbably drinks Steam Whistle with a horny farmer. (Product placement trumps verisimilitude.) He gets lost in the woods in Banff and surfs off of Vancouver Island. As I recall, I don’t think anything happens to him in Manitoba, alas. Along the way he considers what really matters, lists life’s compromises, and ponders the deep subjectivity of food odour, an issue never resolved.
If looming death doesn’t over-burden One Week, it hardly injects it with a great deal of urgency either. Jackson emanates sweetness and familiarity, but can’t seem to convey the minimal panic, revelation and/or insanity required by the situation. McGowan falls back on sentimentality and staying shackled to over-prudent story editing when he could have chosen to explore at least a couple of roads less traveled, which is the secret gift waiting inside the road movie for those willing to roll with it. So One Week is often a bit dull, sometimes wince-worthy, yet so genuinely good-natured you still walk out kinda rooting for it, hoping that its title isn’t a prediction for how long it’ll last in theatres.
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