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.
