South of Wawa

Another boring pretentious puerile simplistic hokey morally upright Canadian pooch of a film. Save your pennies for a real movie. Bow wow.

This is one of my favorite movies. I love the variety of carefully crafted characters, and the screen play is a clever look at small town romance and fantasy. Many components are in this film - even one underage sex implication. Overall the film is charming and memorable.

This is a pleasant little ensemble piece populated by the mildly eccentric individuals who amble the streets of small towns everywhere. It's not only relevant for Canadians; there are plenty of Michiganders and Iowans who will recognize these characters too.

The plot is a slow peeling back of secrets both within and without the characters. There's humour and tragedy, lust and hesitant steps toward love, and some seriously dysfunctional relationships that may well have you thinking 'WTAF' for years afterward.

Also, the isolation of that stretch of Northern Ontario around Wawa (yes, a real town) is almost a character by itself. You could see it existing in a pocket dimension even now, while the rest of the world has moved on.

It took me quite a while to like this film, and although I was enjoying it towards the end, it wasn't quite good enough to recommend. The problem is, there are too many characters that make brief appearances at the start of the film, and since few of them get any significant screen time, it takes too long to start to know and care about these secondary roles. On a positive note, perhaps the best thing about this movie was the generally mellow soundtrack, so at least I had something pleasant to listen to even when the story was dragging. Unfortunately, the film dragged a little too often.

This modern vignette of small-town coming-of-age will be familiar to anyone who came to adulthood outside a major city.

We all know the cliques that became entrenched by junior high, and how they just don't interact beyond the most superficial way. Being favourably noticed by someone outside your assigned strata is as hopeless a dream as becoming an astronaut without going through training, but that doesn't stop these young people from hoping, yearning, and ultimately breaking past the longstanding boundaries to say what they mean to the people they care about, and in the process become more firmly their unique selves.

This is an understated, snowy movie with its share of mildly eccentric characters and totally understandable problems. Like a much older small-town movie, South of Wawa (1991), it tugs at a few heartstrings and tickles the odd funny bone on its way to a blowout Christmas Eve party that is sure to get some Waffle House employees in big trouble by Boxing Day.