Delectable Samples: A 2017 Arts Roundup

Robert Lepage in 887.

Since I rarely write about the arts, I welcome the opportunity to briefly comment upon what I enjoyed most this year, even though several of the pieces below have been reviewed by colleagues at Critics At Large. Apart from, perhaps, television, my sampling from the arts scene is relatively small yet I did experience some wonderful aesthetic moments. – Bob Douglas

Two theatre productions I attended this year were outstanding. Auteur Robert Lepage’s one-man bravura performance in 887 unspools the interplay between the fragmented recollections of his family life and the perils of collective Quebec memory from the 1960s to the present. 887 was the number of the apartment building on Murray Avenue in Quebec City where Lepage spent his formative years. The staging is jaw-dropping: a revolving set showing the interior of his current apartment and the exterior of his childhood home that reveals a doll’s-house replica of that apartment complex, toy cars, puppets and hand shadows. The catalyst for these reveries occurred in 2010 when the organizers of a cultural anniversary invited Lepage to recite by heart a 1968 poem, “Speak White.” He found that he could not learn the lines until he had explored his family history, particularly his relationship with his absent father, and how the personal dynamics intersected with the larger world of nationalist politics.

Mommy Issues: HBO’s Big Little Lies

Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Nicole Kidman in HBO's Big Little Lies.

At first glance, the star power involved with David E. Kelley’s small-screen adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel Big Little Lies is so dazzling that it’s easy to believe that this is like nothing you’ve ever seen on TV before. Keep looking, though, and you’ll be able to easily compare the show, which premiered February 19 and airs on Sunday nights on HBO, to other television offerings. That comparison, once made, isn’t always terribly flattering to the new arrival.

The marquee names attached to Big Little Lies include Shailene Woodley, Nicole Kidman, and Reese Witherspoon, with the latter two also serving as executive producers. The show traces the disturbances caused by the arrival of Woodley’s Jane Chapman, an underemployed single mom, and her son Ziggy (Iain Armitage) in the posh seaside neighborhood of Monterey, California. When Ziggy is accused of assaulting the daughter of the high-powered Renata Klein (Laura Dern), it pits Klein against Jane and her self-appointed champion Madeline (Witherspoon), setting in motion a series of events that culminate in a murder in the midst of a trivia night event. Kelley obscures the identity of both the victim and the perpetrator of that crime, giving us brief glimpses of the initial stages of the police investigation into the murder, as well as snippets of interviews with members of the community, in between longer scenes that slowly walk us through the backstory leading up to the killing.

The Tracks of Our Years

Most coming of age movies that examine the tracks of our years often let the music of the era do the walking for them. George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), for instance, provided a softer, more genial look at the past and so he provided a perfectly programmed jukebox of iconic songs from the late Fifties and early Sixties in order to wax nostalgic. Lucas was displaying his marketing savvy, as well, even before Star Wars (1977), in creating a merchandising scheme to sell albums filled with hits for those needing to drift back happily to their good ol' days. Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), however, gave the lie to the Archie comics sensibility that Lucas trafficked in, and also let the songs of Elvis Presley ("Don't Be Cruel"), Fats Domino ("Whole Lotta Loving") and Bobby Darin ("Dream Lover") simply become the air the characters breathed. The Del Vikings' propulsive "Come Go With Me,"for example, is used in both films but is much more memorable in Diner. As Tim Daly's Billy Howard, a reticent Wasp, arrives at the Baltimore train station to be best man at the wedding for Steve Guttenberg's Eddie Simmons, and he's greeted by all his old friends, Daly strides confidently towards them in perfect time to the Del Vikings. It's as if the tune's seductive swing and rhythm provided a casual sway that only his old hometown awakened in him. The music in Diner essentially interacts with the characters, like an ambient intoxicant, that seems to imbue the comic patter that keeps them up all night in their favourite roadhouse dig.

Traveling Women: Wild and Tracks

In Wild, Reese Witherspoon gives a fine, intelligent performance as Cheryl Strayed, a young woman who spent three months walking the thousand-mile Pacific Crest Trail as a means of cleansing herself of the wayward, self-destructive life she’d been living, sleeping around and shooting heroin. It sounds like a showy, Oscar-bait role, but Witherspoon (who was also one of the producers) doesn’t play it that way; she keeps her wit sharp and her character carefully grounded in the grittiness of the material but not its (potential) melodrama. And that’s how the performance has been set up, first by novelist Nick Hornby, who adapted Strayed memoir, Lost: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, using a series of flashbacks to sketch in the life that led her here, and director Jean-Marc Vallée, who understates the sensational parts of her story. (He and Hornby restrict the drugs and the promiscuity to perhaps two slivers each of narrative.) Vallée is the Québecois filmmaker who made a splash – deservedly – in Canadian film circles with his 2005 coming-of-age picture C.R.A.Z.Y. and then went international with Young Victoria and last year’s Dallas Buyers Club. I loved Young Victoria, a gentle, complicated historical drama (also a coming-of-age story) but had mixed feelings about the other: engrossing and original as it was, it was pitched close to the melodramatic edge that Vallée is so cautious about steering clear of in Wild, and the film, as well as its two highly touted central performances (by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto), kept tipping over that edge. The actors were splendid as long as they leaned away from it, toward the humor of their outrageous, opposite-number characters. I have no mixed emotions about Wild. The filmmaking – the way Vallée and his co-editor, Martin Pansa, slip almost subliminally in and out of the past – is stunning. (John Mac Murphy, credited as editor on both Wild and Dallas Buyers Club, is a pseudonym for Vallée.)

A Delicate Gem: Monsieur Lazhar

Mohamed Fellag stars in Monsieur Lazhar

Though Quebec is one of Canada’s more multicultural and diverse provinces, largely because of Montreal's population mix, its cinema has usually failed to reflect that reality. That’s partly because Canada’s cultural policies too neatly divide Canadian film funding into French and English increments: French for Quebec and English for the rest of the country. Thus Montreal Anglophones wanting to make movies in Quebec are usually out of luck, and Francophones wanting to shoot movies in Ontario, which has some sizable French-language enclaves, are equally so. And since that’s the case, Quebec’s French filmmakers are much more likely to make films about their own communities with less attention paid to the other cultures they bump up against. That was the source of some controversy when Anglophone filmmaker Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky) complained – in a French language newspaper interview – that Quebec cinema wasn’t reflecting the multicultural realities of the day. (He did, unfortunately, feel the need to distance himself from the late Mordecai Richler who famously and accurately commented that Quebec nationalists who spoke of Quebec for Quebeckers did not envision people named O’Reilly, Ginsberg and Wong among them. While French filmmakers weren’t being racist so much as myopic, the salient point and end result is identical.) The other reason that a cultural omission exists in Quebec cinema is likely because majorities tend not to try to understand or feature the concerns of minorities. That however is beginning to change. Denis Villeneuve’s excellent Incendies dealt with an Arab family trying to make a new life in Quebec. And Philippe Falardeau’s very fine new movie Monsieur Lazhar is filtered through the prism of a refugee interacting with, and trying to make his way through, a dominant French Canadian landscape.

Lukewarm Offering: Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore

Vanessa Paradis in Café de Flore

Unlike most of the films emanating from English Canada, French Canadian movies, or at least the ones released outside Quebec, are usually so interesting and provocative that it’s startling when a film from there, such as Xavier Dolan’s overrated 2009 debut J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother), turns out to be a dud. In fact, other than Dolan’s misguided effort, and the Quebecois’ continuing and baffling appreciation of the low and crass humour of films like Les Boys and Cruising Bar, both of which have spawned sequels, pretty much everything I’ve seen from there has been worth my time at the cinema. More recently, these have included Denys Arcand's smartly satirical Oscar-winning Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) (2003); Ghyslaine Côté’s Elles étaient cinq (The Five of Us) (2004), a powerful and disturbing look at the ramifications of rape on its victims; Bernard Emond’s deeply philosophical and moving 20h17 rue Darling (8:17 p.m. Darling Street) (2004), which offers much relevant and topical wisdom about Quebec’s economic underclass; Jean-Marc Vallée’s superb and highly imaginative coming-of-age masterpiece C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005); and Denis Villeneuve’s poignant, emotionally devastating family drama Incendies (Scorchers) (2011), among others. Those French-language movies have managed to be intelligent, accessible and energetic, unlike the usual English Canadian model, which is mostly comprised of stiff, restrained and dull art house fare. (That’s a dictum best exemplified by almost the complete output of Atom Egoyan (Ararat, Chloe)). They also provide proof that Canadian movies can work on many entertaining levels at the same time. That’s why Jean Marc Vallée’s third film, Café de Flore, is such a disappointment; it’s a movie whose appeal lies entirely in the director’s mind.