Cynical Cinema

Alliance Films is releasing the movie adaptation of one of Canada’s most enduring and popular novels, The Stone Angel, today, September 16th. This is one of my favourite books, but it’s not the type of classic book that lends itself to a classic screenplay. And while there are certainly some good things going on in this movie, it doesn’t really work overall. Now, I’ve read Margaret Laurence’s book. So I didn’t expect gunfights and car chases and hilarious jokes. I expected a long, slow meditation on the life of Hagar Shipley full of flashbacks as she reflected on her life as an old woman. And that’s exactly what I got. With an emphasis on the “long” and the “slow”.

Ellen Burstyn is wonderful as the old, stubborn, bitter Hagar. She does a great job of conveying Hagar’s double standards in life, especially when it comes to her children. Do as I say, not as I did, and so forth. Her resistance toward the actions of her children is more of a self-loathing regret than it is good parental advice, and this comes through loud and clear in Burstyn’s performance. Also terrific are Dylan Baker as her adult son Marvin, Kevin Zegers as her adult son John, and Ellen Page as John’s girlfriend. But they all appear so briefly. Or at least it feels that way in a movie that feels far too long. It’s like listening to certain types of jazz, in that you can tell there is brilliance there, but it isn’t immediately apparent where, and even if you knew you might still be bored.

In the book, one of the most interesting and powerful scenes was a scene when Hagar, as an old woman, runs off on her son who is trying to put her in a home, and makes her way to the seaside cabin she remembers from her youth. While there, she gets drunk and has a great talk with a young man, while her past blurs with her present are we’re not even sure if she is in the right house. But for me, the most compelling part of that scene was the journey itself. The way she, as an old woman, snuck out of the house and managed to struggle her way down to this cabin. But that gets left out of the movie in favour of more flashbacks.

In the end, this movie is more skillfully made than it is interesting. There is great acting but it fails to become compelling. I can’t really think of anything (other than the getting to the cabin scene) that could have been either added or omitted for greater effect. I can’t think of how this movie could have been better done, or how it could have been better acted. And yet, I realize that is because I love the book. And I am familiar with the book to such an extent that I watch the movie from that perspective. And it becomes rather clear to me that it was made from that perspective as well. Not that The Stone Angel is too faithful to the book, but that it makes the assumption that simply running through the same scenes as the book does, with great actors to make those scenes come alive, is enough to create the same impact. And it isn’t.

The first five minutes of The Tracey Fragments are all over the place. Pictures in pictures, fragmented story, bizarre “fragmented” filming. And while you have no idea what’s going on, it makes you want to watch. What’s happening? All we really know is that Ellen Page is wearing only a shower curtain, at the back of a bus, searching for her missing younger brother, who thinks he’s a dog. Which all seems very interesting, and really made me excited for the rest of the movie, when it was going to turn into a traditional narrative and explain the story, and stop with this bizarre fragmented filming. And it does explain the story. But it doesn’t have a traditional narrative. And the fragmented editing does not stop. Ever. In the whole movie.

I don’t mind unconventional narrative. I don’t mind jumping through time, disjointed stories, or bizarre filming techniques. But this was too much. Too much weird, most of it seemingly for the sake of being weird. Her father is a jerk, her mother is a seemingly catatonic chain smoker, there is a creepy pimp, a hooker on a bus, a new hot boy in school who looks like Lou Reed, a bizarre transvestite psychiatrist, high school bullies, George Strombolopolous, a big fat clown at a birthday party, a crow, a lowlife named Lance from Toronto, a bar fight, a peeler bar, a crazy drunk who stands on his head, a strange sit-com intro out of nowhere, a rapist, and a ton of other weird things. All of this thrown at us in fragments, in picture-in-picture style, with overwhelming results. We have no idea what to focus on, which I suppose is the point.

But then we get to the end, which is incredibly sad and rotten and brutal, but it doesn’t carry the emotional resonance that it should, because we’re so offput by the strange filming style throughout the film that we really don’t have anything invested in any of the characters. Her little brother is cute, sure. And Lance is basically a good guy. And we like Ellen Page (Tracey) just because she’s Ellen Page and she’s always pretty awesome. But what should be a terribly devastating end to a movie just feels disconcerting and irritating. And I was kind of sorry I’d sat through the entire movie just to get there.

The movie isn’t terrible. It’s artsy and well-acted and ambitious. But it’s almost impossible to watch, and it’s almost impossible to connect with any characters. I think there’s a good movie in here, but Bruce McDonald, the director, is trying so hard to be artistic that he loses sight of what that good movie really is. McDonald has done some really good work in his Canadian career - Highway 61, Hard Core Logo, but here he is just reaching too far. The Tracey Fragments is ambitious and interesting, but it isn’t good. It comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films.