2001 Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Helen Shaver)

Much like MacArthur Park (2001), there’s a genuine earnestness that resonates from this film about drug addiction and redemption, and co-writer/director/co-star Martin Cummins makes excellent use of suburban and ski row Vancouver environs, as well as autobiographical moments derived from his own substance abuse and the death of his mother, but it’s only once it a while the film nestles into a groove and characters come to life.

Those rare moments tend to be humorous – struggling actor/painter Michael (Darcy Belsher) repeatedly summoned outside by an annoying series of phone calls; and artist/painter/best buddy Kris (Cummins) discussing mounted coffee bean sacks while high on heroine – and they buffer the long swathes of meandering melodrama that make up most of the scenes.

The cast is variable – the use of non-actors and amateurs sometimes weakens the tone professionals are working hard to maintain in some scenes – and while Belsher suits Cummins’ role of Michael, a struggling actor dealing with a mother lode of personal crises, Belsher’s emotional breakdowns and whimpering are extremely maudlin, and it takes a while for the character to recover from introspective scenes that lack a strong impact.

Director Cummins delivers a strong performance as Kris, a more complex character who uses drugs to escape from his blah life as a movie set painter, a struggling artist, and boyfriend to Ryan (the sultry Francoise Robertson), and he’s really the main benefactor of all the events that happen to Michael, because it’s only from the film’s final event that Michael is able to free himself from a dead-end path.

The script by Cummins and Richard C. Burton (who also has a small supporting role) mistakenly puts more attention into the character of Kris, and leaves Michael as a vaguely drawn tragic soul determined to change his life after dealing with his mother’s death. Michael’s relationship with his mother is shown in short flashbacks, as well as some amusing hallucinations when he’s getting high with Kris and a hooker named Sherry (Helen Shaver, who also executive produced), but there’s never any insight into the character; he’s a likeable guy, but he’s as bland as the supporting characters.

In the DVD’s making-of featurette, Helen Shaver says of the script’s genesis, “[Cummins] started to say, ‘I’ve got to do something to save my sanity,’ and so out of that was born this script, which wasn’t a very good script when he started. It was sort of a baby’s attempt at writing a script, but that’s where scripts start, that’s where all art stars.”

Character weaknesses are occasionally softened by natural performances from Shaver, Cummins, Robertson, and especially Nicholas Campbell, who plays the owner of a local diner and is a father figure to Kris and Michael, but there’s also a number of small parts that don’t have much purpose.

Michael’s painter friends seem to be present for wan comic relief (if not to give co-writer Burton a part to play), while others seem to have been conceived as poetic ornaments between major scenes, but don’t add anything to the story. The chief example is a guy named John (Barry Pepper) who has just a few scenes with Michael, and we’re never sure who he is except some guy who apparently works at the diner, and talks about his Russian grandfather and lonely hearts ads in a couples magazine.

Rene Auberjonois appears as a homeless man who babbles semi-coherent material at passersby and characters frequenting the diner, and his raison d’etre is to deliver the film’s bookend phrase of “The sky isn’t falling” and “The sky is falling.” He’s local colour, but he’s also a stark contrivance.

More problematic is the character of Red Shoes (an initially unrecognizable Ryan Reynolds), a local drug pusher Michael beats up in the film’s first half. The drug dealer is virtually forgotten for most of the film, and pops up in flashes near the end before he exacts a bit of revenge that’s initially baffling because too much time has passed since his first major scene. There’s also a car accident in which Kris is involved (off-screen, for obvious budgetary reasons), and references to the injured driver become blurred with brief references to Red Shoes being seen by Michael, and ‘how he’s doing’ after the assault.

After its 2000 debut at the Austin Film Festival, Martin Cummins’ feature-length directorial debut was released on DVD in 2002 via Critical Mass/VSC, and has been reissued with more traditional cover art via Critical Mass/Anchor Bay, plus an extra trailer.

The 1.33:1 transfer is clean, although the compression occasionally struggles to address film grain that should’ve been left harsh, since the film’s look is supposed to be slightly crude to match the characters’ harsh world. Some dialogue exchanges were mixed a bit too soft, but the overall stereo mix is decent, with Danny Mack’s score and assorted songs adding a lot of local colour.

The making-of featurette has a number of short interviews with the cast and crew, and although technically crude at times, it shows a caravan of talent high from the experience of making a project everyone hopes will have some breakout success.

Cummins never turns the film into an indulgent, self important creation; the writing and direction is clearly generous towards his characters and the actors, but it takes a long time before the plot moves into gear, and it's a bit of s struggle to reach the redemptive (and satisfying) finale.

© 2009 Mark R. Hasan