The Hanging Garden

I recently saw this again having first seen it in the theater on its release and been spellbound by it.

Thom Fitzgerald is both the writer and director of an exploration into a family's dysfunction and disintegration amid their getting together for the wedding of the daughter.

The film shows the family in both the present and the past and centres around the newly returned son, Sweet William, the father, Whiskey Mac and his wife, Iris, and their relationship to their three children. The father is a nursery man/gardener and the segments of the movie are titled with the names of flowers. As are the children of the family.

In the past, Sweet William, an unhappy overweight boy is conflicted by his latent homosexuality. He develops a relationship with his friend Fletcher. When they are caught making love, the family completely falls apart.

The message of the film revolves around the theme of family secrets and how attempts to bury or ignore them serves only as a temporary cover-up. They will out.

Peter MacMeill, Kerry Fox, Chris Leavins, Troy Veinoitte, Seana McKenna and Sarah Polley give able, believable performances.

Again, it is one of those under-appreciated Canadian gems that have not been brought to a wider audience. And deserve to be.

And it has one of the most surprising, uplifting endings!

8 out of 10. Bravos to all involved.

So you thought your family was strange. Just take a look at Sweet William's clan, and give thanks after all for your brood. A young, well adjusted man returns home after an absence of several years to find old memories returning to haunt him. As the film weaves in and out of time zones, we experience a full portrait of the ultimate dysfunctional family. Are folks really like this, or is it just something in the Nova Scotian water? Nary a dull moment in this stimulating, often thought provoking expose. If you're game, take a deep breath and enter the world of "The Hanging Garden."

Hanging Garden is a small, intensely felt film about a family in tatters and a son whose own problems are eclipsed until he does something he can't take back. Given the film's major conceit is a breach in family fabric that can't be woven back in, magic realism is an applicable term--but only so if shot through the caustic self-wounding humour of the Maritimes, where I lived for six years. If this seems dour, then consider the take-off marriage sequence that opens the film: drunkeness, homoeroticism, Celtic music madness and four-dozen f-words. This film is a gorgeous if painful tribute to growing up in a remove that already seems past its age, in an ocean playground whose garden has gone to seed. This film was ranked, and fairly, as the best Canadian film of 1997 by the Jay Stone of the Globe & Mail (Canada's national newspaper), and if that makes Americans laugh, then consider this is a ranking ahead of Sweet Hereafter, which only made it to the Best Director Oscar Nomination and Cannes Recognition for Atom Egoyan and was also Roger Ebert's #2 film of the year. Adulations all around are deserving for this home-grown production. The film only suffers from inexperience with some actors and having to come up with a conclusion for a tale that can't logically have one. And the parents are excellent in it too, especially the mum. At the singular, crucial sequence of the film all the elements of the film - colour, symbolism, lamentation and ladyslipperknots - fuse in breathtaking splendor, and I mean so in the inhaled gasp that graces the east coast 'yes '. It still stuns me in memoriam. Four Stars * * * *

Sometimes overly poetic in its gardening parallels, this story of a young man who returns to home after a number of years is intense, mysterious, and certainly not lacking in style. In a unique mixture of flashback fantasy sequences, where characters in the past actually interact with those in the present, we see an overweight teenager come to grips with his homosexuality and the returning adult come to grips with his childhood self.

This is an amazing directorial debut, and the abundance of cinematic tricks are a welcome storytelling tool. Virgin Mary Icons smile at us; a grown man witnesses the suicide he committed in his youth.

The director chooses not to draw thick boundaries around the sexuality of his characters, but doesn't fall into the trap of making them frustratingly ambiguous. Often this leaves the sour aftertaste of homophobia.

The mysterious final chapter closes without the pomp and glory that more established directors might have resorted to. It's subtlety complements its outlandishness in a way that doesn't leave you confused.

The main obstacle in the way of my enjoying this film is the disconcerting elements of surrealism and irrationality inserted into a film that is in every other way naturalistic. I must say I had some difficulty coming to terms with this aspect of the film which at first glance made no sense at all. I was irritated by it. Taken at face value this aspect of the film was ludicrous. It goes like this:

We have a grotesquely obese teenager who has a homosexual encounter. He is caught in the act by his grandmother and, as a result, is taken by his mother to see a young woman who's forte is sexual initiation. Either this, his previous experience or his obesity, depresses him so much that he commits suicide. And we know he succeeds because all the flowers in the garden die with him. But, and this is where the madness and contradictions start, he comes back from the dead ten years later metamorphosed into a handsome, slim young man! And he finds his doppelganger still hanging from the tree in the garden!

Now a doppelganger is a figment of someone's imagination, a wraith that doesn't really exist; and if it had remained as such, say a symbolic representation of his earlier life, I would have had little difficulty in going along with it. But no. He touches it and his dad hugs it and he then buries it and his dad tries to dig it up. Well, you can't bury a doppelganger, so it must be a real body, a body that's been hanging from a tree for ten years without showing any signs of decomposition. And if it is a real dead body and it's his real dead body, how come he's still alive?

Now if you can accept all this as not being real behaviour but as some elaborate metaphor for his wish to be free of his past and his dad's wish to cling onto it, then you might just enjoy the film. It has a lot of good things going for it.