Slow Ride

Hog wild: Raymond (Pierre-Luc Brillant) and Doris (Johanne Lebrun) in Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. Photo Sébastien Raymond. Courtesy TVA Films.

The big movie story this year, repeated ad nauseum in everything from entertainment news shows to high-minded film-geek magazines, was the dramatic decline in box-office grosses. Every other weekend, it seemed, ticket sales dropped, and the collective groan in Hollywood was louder than King Kong’s roar. But it’s not that people aren’t watching movies — it’s just that they aren’t going out to see them. DVD sales skyrocketed, people started downloading movies to their iPods and this past summer, for the first time, pirated DVDs of recent releases were brazenly hawked on sidewalks across Canada.

It’s unlikely you’d find a copy of Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies on those tables. In English Canada, we still aren’t watching Canadian movies. A drop in box office? We’d actually have to have some kind of box office to begin with. Over the last five years, Telefilm, the Crown Corporation that bankrolls almost all domestic productions, has tried to increase Canadian audiences for Canadian features. Its modest goal is to capture five per cent of the domestic box office by 2006. With a year left in that mandate, the actual figure remains at a dismal one per cent. I have a hard time believing Trailer Park Boys: The Movie will be the picture to inflate that number in 2006, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Deepa Mehta’s Water and Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. were two of the most successful Canadian films of the year. As of late November, Mehta’s film had crossed the elusive $1-million threshold. C.R.A.Z.Y. earned $6 million in Quebec, and also found supportive audiences in English Canada. (It’s Canada’s official foreign-language entry at the 2006 Academy Awards.) Water, a dissection of the politics of widowhood in India, is arguably Mehta’s finest film. C.R.A.Z.Y. is also a tearjerker, but the anguish is softened by a feel-good soundtrack (bursting with David Bowie hits) and the delightful presence of Michel Côté as the charming, if homophobic, father of five sons.

The reigning auteurs of Canuck cinema, David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, went head to head this year, both premiering new works at Cannes. Cronenberg’s A History of Violence was superior in every way — commercially, artistically, critically. It may have been overpraised — it’s one of his safest films and the acting is sometimes overwrought — but it was a graceful, muscular and shrewd picture. In Where the Truth Lies, Egoyan’s usual psychosexual investigations mingled uneasily with the tawdry tale of a Martin and Lewis-style comedy duo possibly guilty of murder. Much was made of Egoyan’s reportedly $20-million US budget; surely some of that money could have been spent on a more astute casting director. Neither Colin Firth nor Kevin Bacon seemed suited to their roles, while an adolescent-looking Alison Lohman was wholly improbable as the journalist on their trail.

Shooting star: Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. Photo Takashi Seida. Courtesy New Line Productions/Alliance Atlantis.

There was very little about these two films that was obviously Canadian — aside, perhaps, from the clutch of character actors flanking the leads. A History of Violence was financed completely by an American studio, and both films are set entirely in the U.S. But in both films, it’s a dyspeptic vision of America that may reflect a larger global antipathy.

A similarly cynical view of the American landscape can be found in the films bankrolled by Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions. Skoll was raised in Montreal, educated in Toronto and got rich with eBay (he was the company’s first president), and he was the mastermind behind some of the year’s most intriguing mainstream releases: North Country, Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana. (Coming soon: American Gun and The World According to Sesame Street.) Participant’s mandate is to produce quality films about social issues — and to augment these pictures with robust political-action campaigns.

Clement Virgo’s Lie With Me could inspire a very different kind of action campaign. A problematic film in many ways — most notably in its reduction of a messy, poetic and decidedly dirty source novel to a rote, if explicit, romance — it’s one of the few films I can remember that makes Toronto look like a genuinely fun place to live. Virgo films the city’s streets and homes with an affection one wishes he had lavished on his characters.

With high-profile releases like The Corporation, Shake Hands with the Devil and Go Further, 2004 might have been The Year of the Doc, but very few non-fiction films made any impact in 2005. Velcrow Ripper’s admirable Scared Sacred, which chronicles the aftermath of war in places like Cambodia and Afghanistan, received limited play in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, but it was veteran Allan King’s Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and company — which first screened at the Toronto International Film Festival — that had tongues wagging and tear ducts overflowing. In this “actuality drama” (King’s description), eight residents at Toronto’s Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care go about their daily lives, bickering with caregivers, coping with failing memories and mourning their incessant loneliness. There is often joy in these images, but the film is relentlessly heartbreaking and, gangly title aside, it’s one of the most elegant of the year. It will not be getting a theatrical release, but Memory will be on a television set near you in January.

You’re more likely to watch it there, anyway.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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