Some reservations

Set in 1976 on a Mi’kmaq reserve, writer-director Jeff Barnaby’s already acclaimed, Canadian Film Centre-produced feature debut is a sort of cinematic trickster. Barnaby, a talented young filmmaker of aboriginal descent, presents his audience with what is explicitly intended to be an unsentimental, unflinching vision of the horrors of life within the residential school system and First Nations reserves generally. Those with no first-hand experience of this woeful chapter in Canadian history are compelled to accept Barnaby’s vision as authoritative, and the brutality he employs as necessary and even noble. Yet Rhymes For Young Ghouls problematizes our response by adopting what increasingly feels like a chic cynicism for cynicism’s sake, replete with one-dimensional, grotesque villains and a lazily conceived plot that slides ever-deeper into pulpy, comic book terrain, the final act riddled with nonsensical twists that read above all as convenient ways to ramp up the sleaze and violence.

During the opening flashbacks, Aila (Kawennahere Devery Jacobs) loses her brother to a sad, stupid, booze-fueled accident, her mother to suicide, and her father Joseph (Glen Gould) to prison. As the present-tense story unfolds, Aila, now a tough teenager, has taken over her father’s drug dealing business, along with her apocalypse-obsessed Uncle Burner (Brandon Oakes). Through voice-over and montage, Aila functions as our tour guide through the inferno of the Red Crow reserve, detailing sundry abuses at the hands of the reservation agents, in-fighting between “red trash Indians,” internal politics, bad health, absence of opportunities and irresolvable debt. “Indians don’t understand money,” is one of her many cold, flat declarations. Prominent amidst her on-going sociological diagnosis is, of course, a rundown of substances indulged in, itemizing the variety of high-potency weed she sells to most everyone in the community. “This is what brings my people together,” she says, “the art of forgetfulness.” The story eventually shifts into a more active mode once the ill-humoured Joseph is released from prison, interfering with Aila’s business, prompting increased attention from the nefarious Agent Popper (Mark Antony Krupa), and leading to Aila’s detention and eventual elaborate, faeces-infested revenge against Popper and the residential school.

Barnaby proves himself a strong craftsman from the start, most especially in the steady rhythms of his editing and deft incorporation of a mostly blues-driven soundtrack, and in his use of composition, which transforms cluttered, junk-laden, overgrown living spaces into dark autumnal burrows of resignation and despair. Yet, rather uncharacteristically for a CFC production, Barnaby’s script seems wildly under-examined. The story at times feels like a hasty repurposing of the basic ingredients of Winter’s Bone, though the model for the film’s overall ugly-flamboyant tone is clearly Quentin Tarantino—not necessarily an ideal model when dealing with fraught history. (The mishmash of formal, episodic detours is also very Tarantino: Aila is a gifted illustrator, and there’s a handsome, vaguely relevant animated sequence intended to bring Aila’s notebooks to life, though its contemporary style feels much more the product of Barnaby’s imagination than Aila’s.) Barnaby is a filmmaker to watch, and, given its subject matter and irreverent approach, Rhymes For Young Ghouls is very much worth mulling over and will likely endure as something of a milestone, but its also reckless, its narrative sloppy and its aspirations toward representation dubious. 

              

Tamara Drewe: Vaguely feminist farmland farce hardly Hardy but not half-bad either

Based on Posey Simmonds’ graphic novel, itself a clever, loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Maddening Crowd, Tamara Drewe is set largely in and around a rural Dorset writer’s colony, where a celebrated mystery novelist’s under-loved helpmeet (Tamsin Grieg) serves nummy snacks in dowdy turtlenecks, functions as an unacknowledged editor of sorts to her numerous and apparently mostly talentless residents, attempts to tolerate her husband’s philandering, and gradually kens on to the fact that the shlubby American Hardy scholar (Bill Camp) who keeps coming back to massage his writer’s block is probably falling hopelessly in love with her.

This is a rather sprawling ensemble comedy, so that’s not even the half of what’s going on in Moira Buffini’s adaptation—I haven’t yet introduced the titular character, who isn’t exactly the heroine of the piece but, most pleasingly embodied by Gemma Arterton, is quite obviously its star, a successful young journalist returning to her country home after years away with a new nose and a body to keep the cocks crowing night and day, making her grand appearance in ass-exposing cut-offs and a five-alarm red tank-top. Before we’re through she’ll have wittingly or unwittingly seduced a pretentious London rocker (Dominic Cooper), an even more pretentious middle-aged scribe (Roger Allam), and the local ex-con farm hunk (Luke Evans, sort of a less crazed-looking Michael Shannon) who opens the film shirtless and sweating against the setting sun in a tableau that could grace the cover of any six-dozen Harlequin Romances.

All this business—there’s still the mischievous teenage chorus to work in!—makes for a precarious balancing act. The multiple narratives are well-structured enough to keep us oriented, but from the get-go the overall tone slips into a decidedly broad brand of British comedy, replete with pissing cows and one guy eavesdropping while dropping a log, and Buffini’s dialogue is at times so on the nose—“She doesn’t need a writer; she needs a man!”—it’s nearly comical during those rare scenes that seem designed to be otherwise. The landscapes meanwhile are lovely, the story’s divided into seasons, and the occasional glimpse of London makes the big city seem dreary even for the rich. Director Stephen Frears seems at his best here when nurturing connections between his largely superb cast, as well as when emphasizing the script’s loving homage to bucolic life and sexually empowered women and its barely contained disdain for artsy retreats and emotionally immature men. Having said that, if a couple of the guys were more interesting, it may have elevated the film as a whole.

Wilson: 71 fragments of a morphology of chance

The eponymous protagonist of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly, $23.95) may or may not be a sociopath. He typically greets complete strangers with flamboyantly presumptuous terms of endearment like “brother” or “sister.” In several of the 71 single-page, six-paneled episodes chronicling several years of his troubled if largely banal life we see him make what appears to be genuine attempts at meaningful contact with a fellow human—only to be inevitably disappointed with the response his random act of conditional kindness incites and thence counter-respond with a venomous outburst of pent-up rage. In one episode he waits seated at the post office for no apparent reason other than to convince a stranger to hold onto a large box he’s filled to the brim with dog shit. Wilson does love his dog.

Wilson, like Clowes, was born in the 1960s, hails from Chicago, and currently resides, for reasons he can’t muster, in Oakland, California. Wilson’s baffled by the modern world. He sees a man take a nocturnal dump on a sidewalk. He notes with horror the inexplicable proliferation of nail salons in his community. He struggles with despair: “Not only will I leave no trace of my existence behind, there won’t even be anything from my entire generation lift in another fifty years…” His wife Pippi left him 16 years ago while pregnant. Wilson fantasizes Pippi fell into a life of drug-addled prostitution. They eventually reunite. They seek out their long-lost and now teenaged daughter, who they take on a road trip, though some may call it kidnapping. Wilson’s life accumulates in drama, yet fails to yield the desired sense of order and inner peace, not to mention gainful employment. The final episode, however, may suggest some soul-fortifying autumnal revelation. If this is the case, Wilson, who can usually be relied upon to think out loud, decides not express it. This sudden reticence might sound perverse, but I take it as evidence that certain deeper sensations are simply ineffable.

The way Clowes draws a motel swimming pool makes it hard to tell if it’s full or empty. There’s a deliberately elusiveness to the visuals in Wilson, most notably in its ongoing alternating of jarringly different drawing styles, which render Wilson consistently recognizable yet in an ongoing state of flux. Here he seems younger. Here he has a lazy eye. Here he’s a good 40 lbs overweight. Here his body looks like an orb on sticks. If Clowes were primarily a filmmaker we could say that he shows two main tendencies, one toward the twisted surrealism and narrative density of David Lynch, the other toward the cerebral formalism and uneasy balance of misanthropy and affection of Todd Solondz. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is very much in the Lynch mode. Wilson is more Solondz. But it’s good Solondz. Initially Wilson threatens to amount to nothing more than one depressing punch-line after another, but something’s quietly building in Clowes' hapless character. He nears the precipice of accepting the world. Maybe. In any case his willingness to try to make peace, to communicate, maybe even to gather something like a family around him, is hilariously, almost touchingly relentless. His persistence allows him to take risks the best of us mightn’t ever venture.