The Hanging Garden

"The Hanging Garden" is a slice-of-dysfunctional-life dramady with a coming-of-age flashback which takes you into the tangled web of peculiar family matters and relationships of a Nova Scotia family who live in shadow of a drunkenly abusive patriarch. The quirk infested family includes a gay asthmatic son, a foul mouthed daughter, a wishy-washy mother, a senile old granny, the abusive gardener father, and a kid. The film centers on the grossly overweight son who hangs himself from a tree and remains there as a sort of macabre metaphor for familial dysfunction while living on as a skinny adult and achieving some semblance of normalcy. In spite its obvious weirdness, this earthy flick manages to ground itself with a sense of reality while showing the constant struggle to function in spite of the characters' fractured coping skills. Not for everyone, this fist outing for writer/director Thom Fitzgerald is, IMHO, better than his more recent film "The Event". Fodder for those into quirky flicks about dysfunctional families. (B)

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."

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.

Sweet William, Rosemary, Violet, Basil and the rest. Named after flowers and herbs, people growing together in your typical family garden of mismatched souls. Little William, trying to be something that sets him apart from the rest, something nobody can touch or change. He grows up to be a gay and obese teenager. Lusting after his closest friend. Not the easiest of lives. We meet Willy 10 years later, returning home to celebrate his sister Rosemary's wedding. He is now a slim, attractive young man. But what has happened during those ten years? And who is the little boy running around the house?

Every time I watch this small masterpiece, new layers of meaning turn up. The plot structure gives away some undiscovered truths, together with dialogue pointers I didn't notice before. That, to me, is a film worth seeing! When we showed this at our local film society, it got a great reception, one of the best we ever had for a film.

The Hanging garden is short, bittersweet and - sadly - true to life. You'll find something in this garden for you, whoever you may be!

This film is about a man coming back to his dysfunctional home after he left suddenly 10 years ago.

Right from the beginning, the family is already shown to be dysfunctional and unhappy. The initial wedding scene is unromantic, as it is clear that Rosemary did not want to marry. The grandmother has troubling dementia symptoms, and the father is alcoholic. It exposes a lot of sad and turbulent things that can happen: father's alcoholism, battered mother unable to stand up for herself, parents not being able to accept the son's sexuality, the haunting process of dementia and the destructive power of unresolved grief.

A powerful scene is when William challenges his mother why she has not left her husband. "How will I pay my bills" she says. It's a sad fact, but it is happening to a lot of people right now.

The longer I stayed watching "The Hanging Garden", the more fascinating it became. "The Hanging Garden" has an engaging and complicated plot which is open to interpretation. The ending is unexpected and powerful. It is a film to ponder on, not a film for a popcorn night.