Cynical Cinema

I got a little worried upon seeing the cover of the DVD of Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. Alliance Films releases the DVD on November 4th, and it has apparently won the “Heartland Truly Moving Picture Award”. I went to their website to find out what this all was about. It tells me that Heartland Truly Moving Pictures is a “non-profit organization that recognizes and honours filmmakers whose work explores the human journey by expressing hope and respect for the positive values of life”. Now, it may be just me, but something about that seems vaguely creepy. First of all, the word “Heartland”. It just conveys Sarah Palin’s “real America” to me, a fictional place where men work ten hour days and come home to play catch with their kids while their wives sweep the floors and bake apple pies and bring brownies to PTA meetings. Where the kids say things like “golly” and “hokey smokes”, and they participate in school activities like the glee club and the football team. Every house has a dog with floppy ears and they all go to church and they all vote Republican.

Secondly, the “positive values of life” seems to be a phrase that is basically meaningless. What it really means is the “values that WE deem are positive in life”. Which, judging by the titles that have received this award before, are basically the values of apple pie, summer baseball, and community yard sales. Then there are the message movies, which are certainly more deserving of the title “truly moving picture”. Movies about people with disabilities, about discrimination and race relations and learning that others are just like us and so forth. All of which is great to have in a movie, and I applaud all movies that attempt to make statements such as these, but it does not prevent a good portion of the movies on the Heartland list from being “truly moving” while “truly sucking”. Shall We Dance, I’m looking at you.

Thankfully, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl does not involve dancing. Or Julia Stiles. But it certainly does involve small-town “Real America”, a floppy-eared dog, apple pies and yard sales. You see, there is no greater place to find “heartland”-type Americana than through the eyes of a small child or a struggling family in the Great Depression. Think 12 Dogs of Christmas, Cinderella Man, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Hard Times (the Charles Bronson one), My Man Godfrey, The Grapes of Wrath, Modern Times, and countless others. The Americana portion of this movie is rammed down our throats from the outset, what with the title making a clear point of calling Kit Kittredge An American Girl. She is so Totally American. And that, I find rather irritating.

Then again, Kit Kittredge is also Abigail Breslin. And that certainly works in the character’s favour. I like Abigail Breslin. I like her even more when she is playing Kit next to her father, played by Chris O’Donnell. I think this is mostly because my distaste for Chris O’Donnell makes everyone he acts with seem that much better. Remember Vertical Limit, when Bill Paxton looked like Daniel-Day Lewis? If you, sitting at home, spent that much time on screen with Chris O’Donnell, you could at the very least look as good as Bill Paxton. The rest of the cast is well known. Julia Ormond plays Kit’s mother, and I really like her. Joan Cusack plays a slightly loopy traveling librarian (I guess that was once a profession?) And I’m pretty sick of Joan Cusack. But like I said before, at least this movie doesn’t involve Julia Stiles.

It does involve Stanley Tucci as an out-of-work magician, Colin Mochrie as the leader of a somewhat motley crew of “hobos”, Jane Krakowski as a sexy yet vapid dance instructor, and Max Thieriot as another “hobo” named Will. Will is traveling with a tiny black boy named Countee, and the two of them go from town to town trying to work for food. Kit’s house, what with the depression, has become a place where dozens of people are staying and boarding, and Will and Countee fit in with the magician, the dance instructor and the librarian. The fact that Countee is black never once comes up in the film. It is the 1930s. In America. In the Great Depression. And there is no racism? At all? Or are we glossing over that aspect of things because the child is so young and this is taking place in the Heartland?

Really, the main reason that race is never an issue here is that there is a bigger, more important type of discrimination to be dealt with - anti-hobo sentiment. America is apparently running rife with anti-hobo feelings and hobo-hatred. When some valuables go missing in the neighbourhood, blame automatically falls on Will and Countee, because they are hobos. People talk about running hobos out of town, locking them all up, and so forth. But they don’t realize that - these hobos were once like them! They are former bankers and railway workers and poultry farmers and car dealers. They’re people too! Only Kit, (and sometimes her mom) seem to understand this.

Wallace Shawn shows up as the editor of the local Cincinnati newspaper. Kit, you see, has aspirations of being a great journalist. She is precocious in that American Girl sort of way, headstrong and yet constantly pleasant, and she is continuously bringing stories to the editor in an attempt to get published. She is too precocious to be put off by his gruff and surly demeanour, and of course by the end of the movie she has won him over completely, and he has published her stories, and the world lives happily ever after. This, in no way, affects the plot of the film, which is why I’m putting this here:

Spoiler Alert.

Frankly, I don’t think it will matter much to people if I give away the end of this movie. It’s a kids’ movie, and you know exactly what will happen at the end when you’re about nine minutes in at the beginning. But I have a real problem with the end. Not just that it’s so predictable, and so American Girl Makes Good In America The American Way. But that so much of it is unnecessary. The hobos are being blamed for crimes all over the U.S. There are hobos indicated as “prime suspects” in a series of cities. These cities are shown to Kit, and to us, in red push-pin form on a giant map of the United States. See, there’s a red push-pin in Dayton, so there were crimes committed by hobos in Dayton. There’s one in Topeka, so there were hobo-crimes in Topeka. When Kit finally solves the crime in her own house, she also discovers that the REAL criminal has just come from…Dayton! And Topeka! And all the other red push-pin sites!

So now, we are to believe that ONE guy has committed EVERY hobo-related crime in the entire continental United States over the past year, and that the pervasive public anti-hobo sentiment is solely predicated on the crimes of this one man. Who has never been caught, locked up, or identified except as “a hobo”. And after thousands of crimes through dozens of states, he is still so poor that he is looking to steal a couple of rings and thirty dollars from the lockbox of the poorest homeowners in the country. Even then, we can excuse Kit Kittredge. It’s meant to be for kids, it’s meant to be simplistic, and thinking too hard would just make me angry. And the end, where the newspaper editor shows up and tells Kit her story made it in, and her long-lost father shows up to hug people for thanksgiving dinner, and the hobo army brings offerings of milk and cabbage to the house, is all so sickly sweet and lame that it brings tears to my soul just thinking about it. Again, it’s best not to think about it.

But it’s the little things that drove me nuts at the end. The little black hobo, Countee, takes his hat off and shows up in a dress. Wait - Countee is - a girl? Hahaha, the kids all laugh, and accept her anyway, and life goes on. OK. But the question that immediately popped into MY head was - what the hell is happening here? What’s the point of this? What difference would it have made to the rest of the movie if this bit character had been a girl the whole time? The explanation that it isn’t safe for little girls to ride the trains with hobos doesn’t fly, since the whole movie has been yelling at us that hobos are the friendliest, nicest, most saintly people in the entire world. Except for the one guy who commits every crime in the U.S. So really, this is totally unnecessary. Look! She’s a girl! She’s Will Smith’s daughter Willow! Cute kid, decent little actress, but come on. Totally pointless.

End spoiler.

Overall, there is no real reason NOT to recommend Kit Kittredge. Although it’s totally kiddy, that’s who will want to watch it anyway. And do adults really care that kids can solve complicated crimes in four seconds when the script calls for it, and that th bad guys have a treasure map with an “X” marked on it and a certain number of paces to go before they dig under the big Oak Tree? Probably not. The beginning is cute, and becomes sad and depressing fairly fast. That is so the movie has somewhere to go, to lift your spirits. And the end is sickly sweet, painfully obvious, and childlike in it’s innocence, it’s simplicity, and it’s Happily Ever After. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call this a Truly Moving Picture. In fact, I know for certain that I wouldn’t. But I would call this a Truly Harmless Picture. And it might even teach the kids something. If they can suspend their cynicism.

I did not need to read the back of the DVD for Surviving My Mother to figure out it was shot in Montreal and that it was a Canadian film. You see, it stars Colin Mochrie. While Mochrie is no Colm Feore or Roy Dupuis, his involvement in a movie instantly identifies it as Canadian. Also, during the movie, he mentions attending St. Piux X high school. That seems pretty Canadian to me. However, this is the amazing thing: Had I not been aware of Mochrie and St. Pius X, I would not have known! So many movies and TV shows that are made in Canada just smack of “Canadian”. Even the big-budget experiments, the shows that make an attempt to be just like American shows - think Street Legal, or Nikita. (Which of course stars Roy Dupuis.) They had high ambitions, and Cynthia Dale and Peta Wilson were certainly international-hot, rather than just Canadian-hot, but there was something about those shows, something I could never put my finger on, that screamed “Canadian” at me when I watched. It was unavoidable, as though Canuck was something stamped into the film that couldn’t be shaken no matter how hard the producers tried. Call it the Curse Of Danger Bay.

By the way - when I was a kid, I thought the most beautiful woman on earth had to be Nancy Sakovich, star of such Canadian fare as Destiny Ridge and Psi-Factor. To this day, I maintain that she was the only reason to watch either of those shows. She later played Silken Laumann in a made-for-TV biopic, and the same year starred in another made-for-TV biopic, The Jesse Ventura Story. As you can see from this picture, she is still very attractive. But usually, in Canadian TV shows and movies, the “hot girl” was what screamed “second class Canadian!” at the top of her lungs. Because usually the “hot girl” was the chick who played Amanda on Ready Or Not, or the older daughter from Danger Bay, or someone like that. All attractive girls, to be sure, but it’s a different kind of attractive. Were the film or show American, the girls would be played by Jessica Simpson or Mischa Barton or some such thing. There was just an added bit of glamour. Now, it was likely in the way they were shot, more so than in the actual selection of the actresses, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was always a distinct difference.

OK. Now that I had an excuse to put a picture of Nancy Sakovich into a review of a totally non-Nancy-Sakovich related movie, here are some words about Surviving My Mother. It does not smack of Canadian. That, I truly believe, is one of the highest compliments one can pay a Canadian movie. You film it here, you use our stars, you use our cinematographers, and yet an outsider would not know it was Canadian. That’s huge. Now, before all you rah-rah patriotic Canadians get righteously indignant with me, I would like to say this: A movie or TV show that smacks of Canadian is bad. Nikita, Danger Bay, Bumper Stumpers, Bon Cop Bad Cop. But something that feels Canadian is good - Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Away From Her, or Surviving My Mother. This movie is good. And it feels Canadian. Ellen David plays Clara, a woman whose mother has been sick for a long time, living with the family, and has been an enormous burden on everyone. She is a horribly bitter old woman, played comically by Veronique Le Flaguais. Colin Mochrie is Clara’s husband, and Caroline Dhavernas is their daughter Bianca.

When Clara’s mother finally dies, Clara feels like she needs to recapture some of her life that she wasted doting on the frail old lady. She does that by attempting to re-connect with her daughter, and really getting to know her. This leads to some very good scenes, most notably a scene in a movie theatre that is almost self-referential, where the two of them are watching some stupid Hollywood comedy and the daughter starts sobbing. The big drama in the movie centres around the daughter. Does the mom really want to know her daughter that well? Those of us watching would think not. The daughter, you see, is a very dirty tramp. She sleeps with dozens of married men, with anonymous partners she meets online, and has been whoring herself out for a very long time. Her latest partner turns out to be someone fairly close to the family, a local priest who, like Bianca, is living very much of a double life. I would have liked to see a lot more of the relationship between the priest and his own mother, it seems almost more interesting than the relationship between Clara and Bianca.

The movie is smart, well-written and well acted. Caroline Dhavernas is smoking hot in a very non-Canadian way. Again this isn’t her physical appearance so much as the way she is shot in the movie. She is creepily believable as the seductress, a Linda Fiorentino type almost, who leads men to their doom, and she has a very disturbing scene later on with the young priest. Normally, I watch movies like this one and think “I don’t care HOW hot she is. I would have been out of there weeks ago. No one needs that much drama.” But in this case, I sort of get it. Sort of. Toward the end, the movie gets very melodramatic, with a scene that comes off as unnecessarily harsh, which unleashes a scene that seems like a massive over-reaction, but it still works. In the end, Clara must come to terms with her relationship with her daughter at about the same time she is coming to terms with her own mother. A fine film that feels Canadian, but not obnoxiously so.