Thoughts on CKR's New Film "Normal"
Wow, the response to my report about meeting CKR at the Toronto International Film Festival has been overwhelming. Who knew the guy was so beloved? (Okay, sure, anybody who has ever set eyes on him, but that's beside the point). I think I've gotten caught up on the comments, and I'll move on to the second part of my Callum-heavy festival report with some thoughts on his new film Normal which premiered last night in downtown Toronto.
I've put both a spoiler-free and spoiler-heavy response to the film beneath cut-tags, so pick your poison:
Just some general impressions for you spoiler-free folks: Normal is a major part for Callum. He had at least as much screen time as Carrie-Anne Moss and it's probably his most significant role in terms of both the size of the part and the kind of emotional arc his character travels. Callum is at his usual best although the script wasn't as strong as it could have been. There were some dialogue issues, a few plot points didn't make sense, and on the whole the film probably could have benefited from some more careful editing the screenplay should have gone through at least another draft before the movie was ready to be filmed. However Normal it did offer some wonderful moments of insight into the process of grief and mourning, and...okay, I'll be juvenile for a second and say that Callum had a few sex scenes in this, including a lovely morning-after sequence involving warm sunlight and ice cream. There was also handporn, and a lot of lingering shots of his face and body although he is disappointingly fully clothed for most of the movie. (I'd like to write a sternly-worded letter to Mr. Bessai about this nonsense of filming the actress topless while the actor gets to lounge around in an undershirt). Callum is beautiful in this film and the cinematography style and lighting conditions really did him justice.
Just a note to those of you (meresy, primroseburrows and scriggle) who might see it on the big screen: the movie was filmed largely using steadicam shots and my friend Sarah got pretty sick during the screening, to the point where she had to close her eyes and listen to most of the movie. She did like the film but felt too ill to keep looking at the screen, and even my ironclad tummy revolted a little during the film's climax. You probably won't have this problem on the small screen but forewarned is forearmed and such.
I'm not sure what else I can say without getting into the specifics of the plot and CKR's character but rest assured he's playing a fairly decent human being in this film who goes through something traumatic and reacts in ways probably familiar to anyone who has endured such an awful, life-shattering experience. This part was miles away from Callum's role in, say, Suspicious River, and his character was sort of a mix between Duck Macdonald and Billy Talent grown into unhappy middle-age.
So, um, that's it for the spoiler-free version. I hope it worked for those of you who prefer general impressions. Below you'll find detailed spoilers of the film's plot.
3
2
1
I didn't like the film but I suspect that after a few viewings on a smaller screen at home I'll come to appreciate it more. This is certainly Callum's meatiest role to date: he shows a lot of range and while his character wasn't exactly a likable figure (none of the film's principal roles were) Callum's performance was compelling and much more layered than the screenplay probably deserved.
The film begins two years after a devestating two-car accident that claimed the life of a teenage boy. The accident happens entirely offscreen as the film is much more concerned with the long-term affects of pain and grief. We are slowly introduced to the characters: the boy's mother, Catherine (Carrie-Anne Moss), who continues to seethe with anger and despair over the loss of her son; Walt Braugher (Callum's character), an English professor and frustrated creative writer whose drunken misjudgement caused the accident; and Jordie (Kevin Zegers), recently released from juvenile detention for his role in the fatal crash. Moss' son was the passenger in Jordie's stolen car: the two boys were out for a joy ride when Walt hit them. The reasons why Jordie went to prison while Walt escaped punishment is one of the narrative oversights I mentioned earlier, as is the way Walt's ongoing and largely unproblematic relationship with alcohol is handled in some later sequences. I would have liked to see more development there but, well, it's space we can explore in the inevitable post- and pre-movie fic, right? :-)
In another wrinkle (I said Callum's part was complex, right?) Walt's autistic, agoraphobic brother (Tygh Runyan) was injured in the accident and has since become largely dependant on Walt for everything. Walt's marriage is also in a state of collapse: his wife (a former student) grows increasingly frustrated with his lingering depression and isolation, and she questions where his creative impulses went. There is an extremely painful confrontation between Walt and his wife at one point and the kind of verbal cruelty he unleashes on her is probably a good illustration of how only someone who knows you intimately can push exactly the right buttons in order to cause you the maximum amount of pain.
There's an underdeveloped B-plot where Walt encourages his brother to meet with a female pen-pal recently been released from prison, and it's here that I think the narrative comes off the track. It's a slapstick element that felt out of place and, at least in my opinion, it really struck the wrong note. I wasn't quite sure what the director was going for: comedic relief? poignancy? some kind of statement about the courage it takes to reach out, and that Callum lacks the very courage he wants his brother to possess? It made me go all twisty-brained (tm troyswann) but not in a good way, and I think it probably should have been cut or altered during the draft stage of the screenplay.
At any rate, we see a few brief, endearing glimpses of the man Walt was before the crash: he flirts with a student (ooooh Calum, that smile!) and he seems to rouse himself around his brother, but Walt clearly hasn't begun to deal with his role in the accident and the guilt and shame it has caused. Walt tries therapy but his psychologist turns out to be the father of Jodie, the boy whose friend died in the accident, and so Walt begins to drift more and more. He embarks on an extra-marital affair with the flirtatious female student but even then Walt seems detached and disappointed in himself and his own fantasies. It's as though he's hoping to find absolution in sex and when that doesn't work he loses all hope. What does finally set him on the path to redemption him is a violent physical confrontation with the mother of the boy he killed. Both CKR and Carrie-Anne Moss do a terrific job in this scene. As Catherine's blows rain down on him Walt falls weeping into the driveway and Moss' character screams, "Do you expect me to forgive you? What? What do you want from me?" She roughly drags him out of the way of her car and leaves him curled up in a ditch, and she doesn't look back as she drives away.
It's to the film's credit that there is no attempt to make the audience feel like these are good people coping well with grief. Normal isn't a movie-of-the-week weepie about the power of healing. It is about melancholy in all its forms, that ugly, persistent, nawing grief that is as much about wallowing in your own misery and loss of self as it is about grieving for the person you've lost. These aren't good people and no one behaves particularly well: Catherine is abusive toward her remaining son and seethes with silent anger at her husband, who has managed to rebuild after their child's death. Jordie has an affair with his stepmother and there's a fairly brutal and explicit sex scene where he and his stepmother tumble into bed, the father returns home, and Jordie hides in the bathroom and watches his father fuck his stepmother without a lot of preamble. There are ugly moments and while I appreciate the intent some of it left a bad taste in my mouth. However, the last twenty minutes of the film were terrific. Melancholy is, at its heart, about unresolvable grief, and I liked the way the film's structure (it opens and concludes with aerial shots of expensive mansions along the coast of Vancouver Island) looped back in on itself to demonstrate that there is no end to sorrow and that pain never really dies but simply transitions into something else.
There's also a neat unintentional echo to Wilby Wonderful in the expression on Walt's face in his last scene. After the confrontation with Moss' character Walt goes to a pizza place (where Jordie had been briefly employed) and sits drinking a coffee, contemplating the direction of his life. He looks up to the sky and smiles, and in that moment CKR's character looked a little like Dan Jarvis in that moment before the chair leg snaps, although Walt obviously has come to a more brutal and hard-won epiphany.
Inevitably Normal does invite comparisons to Ordinary People, the acclaimed Mary Tyler Moore/Donald Sutherland/Timothy Hutton film that explored maternal grief and melancholic fugue. I think it represents a big leap forward in terms of the gender politics of grief: melancholy is a feminized state of sorrow first identified by Freud and then picked up by Victorian gender theorists: it is supposed to represent an unresolvable, self-centred style of mourning that lacks the "productive" aspects of the move-on-with-it masculine state of grief. I appreciated the way this film sought to apply its circular look at grief to male and female characters; it demonstrated that while coping mechanisms vary from individual to individual when tragedy strikes not everyone is able to bounce back, and sometimes they bring other people down with them. Gender has nothing to do with it. In that sense I think it is revolutionary (especially in comparison to 1980's Ordinary People) but I didn't identify with the characters and the stilted dialogue, makeshift narrative work and some pacing problems made this an interesting but not entirely compelling film. It is worth it to see Callum's performance and Moss' stellar work but this film might be another in a long line of Canadian cinema that approaches greatness but is too weighted down by its own sense of unhappiness to cross the finish line at full steam.
Okay. So those were my impressions, and take them with a grain of salt in the grand spirit of IMHO and other internet qualifiers. I hope this review was semi-coherent and maybe even useful to you when you get a chance to screen the film for yourself. Thanks for all the squee-ful comments on the RL encounter with Callum: I'm still on cloud nine, and I really, really wish fangirls had been with me to share the moment. (What? It was totally a moment!) I'm meeting with meresy, scriggle and primroseburrows tomorrow for a tour around Toronto, and then there's the Silk screening on Thursday. After the unflinching emotional realism of Normal I'm really in the mood for a good costume drama. More TIFF updates soon!
I've put both a spoiler-free and spoiler-heavy response to the film beneath cut-tags, so pick your poison:
Just some general impressions for you spoiler-free folks: Normal is a major part for Callum. He had at least as much screen time as Carrie-Anne Moss and it's probably his most significant role in terms of both the size of the part and the kind of emotional arc his character travels. Callum is at his usual best although the script wasn't as strong as it could have been. There were some dialogue issues, a few plot points didn't make sense, and on the whole the film probably could have benefited from some more careful editing the screenplay should have gone through at least another draft before the movie was ready to be filmed. However Normal it did offer some wonderful moments of insight into the process of grief and mourning, and...okay, I'll be juvenile for a second and say that Callum had a few sex scenes in this, including a lovely morning-after sequence involving warm sunlight and ice cream. There was also handporn, and a lot of lingering shots of his face and body although he is disappointingly fully clothed for most of the movie. (I'd like to write a sternly-worded letter to Mr. Bessai about this nonsense of filming the actress topless while the actor gets to lounge around in an undershirt). Callum is beautiful in this film and the cinematography style and lighting conditions really did him justice.
Just a note to those of you (meresy, primroseburrows and scriggle) who might see it on the big screen: the movie was filmed largely using steadicam shots and my friend Sarah got pretty sick during the screening, to the point where she had to close her eyes and listen to most of the movie. She did like the film but felt too ill to keep looking at the screen, and even my ironclad tummy revolted a little during the film's climax. You probably won't have this problem on the small screen but forewarned is forearmed and such.
I'm not sure what else I can say without getting into the specifics of the plot and CKR's character but rest assured he's playing a fairly decent human being in this film who goes through something traumatic and reacts in ways probably familiar to anyone who has endured such an awful, life-shattering experience. This part was miles away from Callum's role in, say, Suspicious River, and his character was sort of a mix between Duck Macdonald and Billy Talent grown into unhappy middle-age.
So, um, that's it for the spoiler-free version. I hope it worked for those of you who prefer general impressions. Below you'll find detailed spoilers of the film's plot.
3
2
1
I didn't like the film but I suspect that after a few viewings on a smaller screen at home I'll come to appreciate it more. This is certainly Callum's meatiest role to date: he shows a lot of range and while his character wasn't exactly a likable figure (none of the film's principal roles were) Callum's performance was compelling and much more layered than the screenplay probably deserved.
The film begins two years after a devestating two-car accident that claimed the life of a teenage boy. The accident happens entirely offscreen as the film is much more concerned with the long-term affects of pain and grief. We are slowly introduced to the characters: the boy's mother, Catherine (Carrie-Anne Moss), who continues to seethe with anger and despair over the loss of her son; Walt Braugher (Callum's character), an English professor and frustrated creative writer whose drunken misjudgement caused the accident; and Jordie (Kevin Zegers), recently released from juvenile detention for his role in the fatal crash. Moss' son was the passenger in Jordie's stolen car: the two boys were out for a joy ride when Walt hit them. The reasons why Jordie went to prison while Walt escaped punishment is one of the narrative oversights I mentioned earlier, as is the way Walt's ongoing and largely unproblematic relationship with alcohol is handled in some later sequences. I would have liked to see more development there but, well, it's space we can explore in the inevitable post- and pre-movie fic, right? :-)
In another wrinkle (I said Callum's part was complex, right?) Walt's autistic, agoraphobic brother (Tygh Runyan) was injured in the accident and has since become largely dependant on Walt for everything. Walt's marriage is also in a state of collapse: his wife (a former student) grows increasingly frustrated with his lingering depression and isolation, and she questions where his creative impulses went. There is an extremely painful confrontation between Walt and his wife at one point and the kind of verbal cruelty he unleashes on her is probably a good illustration of how only someone who knows you intimately can push exactly the right buttons in order to cause you the maximum amount of pain.
There's an underdeveloped B-plot where Walt encourages his brother to meet with a female pen-pal recently been released from prison, and it's here that I think the narrative comes off the track. It's a slapstick element that felt out of place and, at least in my opinion, it really struck the wrong note. I wasn't quite sure what the director was going for: comedic relief? poignancy? some kind of statement about the courage it takes to reach out, and that Callum lacks the very courage he wants his brother to possess? It made me go all twisty-brained (tm troyswann) but not in a good way, and I think it probably should have been cut or altered during the draft stage of the screenplay.
At any rate, we see a few brief, endearing glimpses of the man Walt was before the crash: he flirts with a student (ooooh Calum, that smile!) and he seems to rouse himself around his brother, but Walt clearly hasn't begun to deal with his role in the accident and the guilt and shame it has caused. Walt tries therapy but his psychologist turns out to be the father of Jodie, the boy whose friend died in the accident, and so Walt begins to drift more and more. He embarks on an extra-marital affair with the flirtatious female student but even then Walt seems detached and disappointed in himself and his own fantasies. It's as though he's hoping to find absolution in sex and when that doesn't work he loses all hope. What does finally set him on the path to redemption him is a violent physical confrontation with the mother of the boy he killed. Both CKR and Carrie-Anne Moss do a terrific job in this scene. As Catherine's blows rain down on him Walt falls weeping into the driveway and Moss' character screams, "Do you expect me to forgive you? What? What do you want from me?" She roughly drags him out of the way of her car and leaves him curled up in a ditch, and she doesn't look back as she drives away.
It's to the film's credit that there is no attempt to make the audience feel like these are good people coping well with grief. Normal isn't a movie-of-the-week weepie about the power of healing. It is about melancholy in all its forms, that ugly, persistent, nawing grief that is as much about wallowing in your own misery and loss of self as it is about grieving for the person you've lost. These aren't good people and no one behaves particularly well: Catherine is abusive toward her remaining son and seethes with silent anger at her husband, who has managed to rebuild after their child's death. Jordie has an affair with his stepmother and there's a fairly brutal and explicit sex scene where he and his stepmother tumble into bed, the father returns home, and Jordie hides in the bathroom and watches his father fuck his stepmother without a lot of preamble. There are ugly moments and while I appreciate the intent some of it left a bad taste in my mouth. However, the last twenty minutes of the film were terrific. Melancholy is, at its heart, about unresolvable grief, and I liked the way the film's structure (it opens and concludes with aerial shots of expensive mansions along the coast of Vancouver Island) looped back in on itself to demonstrate that there is no end to sorrow and that pain never really dies but simply transitions into something else.
There's also a neat unintentional echo to Wilby Wonderful in the expression on Walt's face in his last scene. After the confrontation with Moss' character Walt goes to a pizza place (where Jordie had been briefly employed) and sits drinking a coffee, contemplating the direction of his life. He looks up to the sky and smiles, and in that moment CKR's character looked a little like Dan Jarvis in that moment before the chair leg snaps, although Walt obviously has come to a more brutal and hard-won epiphany.
Inevitably Normal does invite comparisons to Ordinary People, the acclaimed Mary Tyler Moore/Donald Sutherland/Timothy Hutton film that explored maternal grief and melancholic fugue. I think it represents a big leap forward in terms of the gender politics of grief: melancholy is a feminized state of sorrow first identified by Freud and then picked up by Victorian gender theorists: it is supposed to represent an unresolvable, self-centred style of mourning that lacks the "productive" aspects of the move-on-with-it masculine state of grief. I appreciated the way this film sought to apply its circular look at grief to male and female characters; it demonstrated that while coping mechanisms vary from individual to individual when tragedy strikes not everyone is able to bounce back, and sometimes they bring other people down with them. Gender has nothing to do with it. In that sense I think it is revolutionary (especially in comparison to 1980's Ordinary People) but I didn't identify with the characters and the stilted dialogue, makeshift narrative work and some pacing problems made this an interesting but not entirely compelling film. It is worth it to see Callum's performance and Moss' stellar work but this film might be another in a long line of Canadian cinema that approaches greatness but is too weighted down by its own sense of unhappiness to cross the finish line at full steam.
Okay. So those were my impressions, and take them with a grain of salt in the grand spirit of IMHO and other internet qualifiers. I hope this review was semi-coherent and maybe even useful to you when you get a chance to screen the film for yourself. Thanks for all the squee-ful comments on the RL encounter with Callum: I'm still on cloud nine, and I really, really wish fangirls had been with me to share the moment. (What? It was totally a moment!) I'm meeting with meresy, scriggle and primroseburrows tomorrow for a tour around Toronto, and then there's the Silk screening on Thursday. After the unflinching emotional realism of Normal I'm really in the mood for a good costume drama. More TIFF updates soon!