McKellen plays a senior UK academic returning to Canada to receive an honorary degree. He stays with his niece (Unger) who is newly separated (that's her hubby off the budget) and her grumpy adolescent daughter. Relations are frosty at first until the issue gets aired, which sets our hero off on a journey down memory lane to his troubled family farm on the prairies. Everything revolves around McKellen and his character, whom we have to believe and care about. Sadly, we learn almost nothing about him apart from an initial glimpse of his college rooms and a dumpy woman "assistant" (with the muted suggestion that he is gay). We do not even learn anything about his scientific studies, the focus of his life's work, so his character would not pass the elementary requirements of a screen writing software package. How scripts with structural problems like this get green-lighted by national film-funding bodies is beyond me. There is a further problem with Unger's character, when she asks the professor: "Do you remember my mother?" and he says "not really", thus removing any possibility of dealing with the orphaned Unger's most important relationship. A further problem arises with the flashback passages in which we glimpse his brothers, but not well enough to understand their motivations or his relationship with them. Finally, the script fails to provide an adequate breakthrough to resolve his situation, and the pay-off is therefore unsatisfying. However, because the film is intelligently filmed and directed, these faults are not hidden, and the film works in spite of them, particularly for McKellen fans who love his puckish face and plummy accent.
Emile
(2003)
Slow start and plot faults mar Canadian redemption movie
10 August 2009
Warning: Spoilers