Monkey Beach

I loved the novel Monkey Beach when it came out 20 years ago. It was a vibrant, gritty story about a girl named Lisa from Kitamaat Village. She grows up playing with her cousins at the marina in the summer, develops into a dope-smoking teen who hangs out with guys, and when she sees and hears things others don't, she keeps it to herself. If you grew up in Kitimat, you feel like you already know her.

This Monkey Beach is filmed in Kitimat and Kitamaat, and it features a main character named Lisa, but there's little left in it of Eden's voice. Grace Dove is radiant with serene beauty portraying a character who leapt off the page as a seething young punk with underdeveloped self esteem and a secret inner world. Adam Beach is a perfectly suited Uncle Mick, but the characters together seem locked into a script that demands they tell a story for every First Nation, using Eden's original story from the Haisla First Nation only as a template. Out-of-character dialogue like Lisa's comment to Paz outside of Rosario's, "This is too much for my heart", are so shoe-horned in you wonder why the script writers didn't start from scratch.

The highlight for me was the appearance of Snotty Nose Rez Kids at a bush party, but even the set design there was like a middle class wedding. The movie was rendered unwatchable by its own self-consciousness, in needing to make too much of the opportunity Robinson's novel presented, as if First Nations people had never represented themselves on film before and might never again. In spite of a solid cast, one-of-a-kind location, and the sparkling raw material of the original story, it never finds its stride. Whereas a classic like Smoke Signals is alive with humour, anguish, and unconcerned personal expression, Monkey Beach seems to have undergone some kind of desperate laminating process. The wrong hands got ahold of this one.

In a world of remakes and predictable storylines cheesy premises spewing out from Hollywood. This movie is pure original art from a novel that opens your mind to the things you have never known before. Take in the breathtaking scenery and the absolutely beautiful performances . Please watch if you can and enjoy.

-- the difference being, that a ghost was once a human being, while a spirit is an elemental piece of nature. That's one thing I learned from this interesting indie film set in a Haisla peoples' village on coastal British Columbia. The protagonist of the story is young Lisa, played by the pretty and aptly named Grace Dove. She has the rather unwanted ability to experience both ghosts and spirits -- she sees dead people now and then, and has friendly chats with them (kind of like old Amarante in "The Milagro Beanfield War"), but the spirit world is a different and more threatening matter. She's constantly troubled by dream-visions of her brother Jimmy (Joel Oulette) drowning and is obsessed with how to prevent it. But there are worse omens: visits in the dark from a tiny, glowing man in traditional gear (as she refers to him, "the little asshole") who seems to be a portent of someone's death, as well as large dark figures in the woods that lurk barely out of sight.

What does it all mean? Her quest to save Jimmy is the simple, main thread of the film and takes us through scenes in and around her village, getting to know her extended family members and friends, and involves several flashbacks to when she was a girl (Zoey Snow) and later a teenager (a very striking Miika Bryce Whiskeyjack). It all reaches a resolution of sorts, though not an entirely traditional one. The final big sequence of scenes is Lisa's vision-quest that ties together elements of previous scenes and at least partly puts them into context; fair warning, there's one truly frightening piece as the climax. Not everything is all neat and tidy at the end, though (What just happened there??) It's not always spelled out for us, and that's OK -- i.e., the message being (I think) that the spirit-world is under no compulsion to explain itself to us, and it has its own drives that are not ours. Just let the mystery settle on its own terms.

The only one of this nice cast of First Nations actors I had seen before was Adam Beach (playing Lisa's uncle as a lively but troubled fisherman). One other character I liked a lot was her grandma, the only one who knows what Lisa is going through (played by Tina Lameman, who almost steals any scene she's in without fuss). One part of the ambience of this whole film that stood out for me was that all these strange experiences Lisa goes through are happening in resolutely ordinary settings -- a small village, beaches and fishing boats, very ordinary houses with very ordinary people just living their ordinary lives. But then, back in deep historical time when legends were born, the people there thought they were just living ordinary lives too.

I don't get people who criticize a movie adaptation because it didn't present a literal recreation of a book they liked. Adaptations are things in themselves that evolve from the need to fit ideas, characters, commentary, internal dialogue and spoken dialogue and more into a different medium with many constraints, not the least of which may be budget.

The only movie I know that almost completely follows the book is the Maltese Falcon -- good book, good movie. One of my favourite books, Catch 22, could never become a movie that way, and yet I have enjoyed both the movie and the short TV series based on it.

The same with Monkey Beach, a book I've read and loved at least three times. But I don't know how you could ever put the literal book on screen. And so I dropped my preconceptions about what it 'should be' and simply watched the movie -- and was mesmerized.

I loved the cinematography, I loved the music and soundtrack and the non-linearity of the storytelling. I found the movie both funny and moving and was knocked out by how good the acting was. I'm not a huge fan of Adam Beach, but he was perfect for the role of Uncle Mick. Glen Gould perfectly portrayed Josh, a traumatized man lashing out at everyone around him. I loved Mama-oo, and young Lisa and can't say enough good things about how right Grace Dove was carrying Lisa's story to its bitter-sweet conclusion.

What can I say? A movie adaptation is like an impressionist painting -- it's not a photograph, it's an experience and a feeling and I'm feeling very good about Ms. Todd's impression of Monkey Beach.

Unless you're spiritual or unless you believe in mysticism, I'd take a pass on Monkey Beach. I was persuaded to watch it based on the generous reviews it has garnered on this website. I can report that it wasn't my cup of tea.