Frameline 34: Grown Up Movie Star

It's hard to describe the impression this brilliant film has made on me without feeling I have still somehow understated its merits. It is the debut feature of little-known (in these parts) Canadian writer and director Adriana Maggs, a low-budget production shot on remote Newfoundland, and starring (for the most part) local actors. A confident and unapologetic look at family life gone awry, it is extremely energetic, unflinching, non-judgmental, funny, and true. Its highly dramatic and somewhat breathless narrative sends us hurtling through a few weeks in the life of disgraced ex-hockey star Ray (played by Shawn Doyle) whose struggles with pot and alcohol and most importantly with his closeted homosexual life contribute to the slapdash, at worst completely neglectful nature of his parenting style after his wife has left. The eldest of his two daughters is beginning to explore her sexuality in misguided and ever more hazardous ways, flirting with her father's best friend and pushing her limits in the small community as she tries to patch together an identity from the shreds of her absent mother's dreams of stardom. The look and feel of the film is raw, messy, and unbeautiful, with its dirty, half-melted piles of snow, its convenience stores, parking lots, pick-up trucks and broken ovens - it's not a film that seeks to distinguish itself in visual/poetic terms. What makes it so extraordinary (I'll get to the stand-out performances in a minute) is the non-stop rollercoaster of its script. Actually, performance and script come together in such an incredible way it's impossible to prioritize one over the other. They are one organic phenomenon, a complete powerhouse. Characters are highly differentiated, thoroughly themselves, which makes for some interesting conflict right off the bat, and the acting is so pitch-perfect you feel like giving thanks. There is something immediate and approachable about the cast, something familiar and yet unusual - perhaps a reflection of their background in Canadian television and theatre. Tatiana Maslany, who plays the sexually precocious 13 year-old Ruby (and who won the Special Jury prize at Sundance 2010) is nothing short of a revelation. The film is unimaginable without her. But the dialogue is a force of nature, an electric current surging through every scene, binding and searing its characters into a physical, fighting knot - these are people who love and defy each other fiercely, who crash into one another head on, or fall over one another in their attempt to back off, and who never stop verbalizing the experience. Whether sarcastic or seductive, desperate, defiant, hilarious, imploring, or plagued with expletives, their exchanges come to define the very space in which they struggle and develop. It is language as a (specifically human) element, and it saturates the film, magnetizing us to it completely. It is as delirious an experience as anything out there in film or print. Add to this the fact that the humor of the situation is always front and center, even when, or especially when, things get rough (and Ruby's vulnerable sexuality doesn't fail to stir up trouble) and the film seems like something of a miracle, delightful and disturbing at once, something that gets close to a perfect essence of people.