The Nature of Nicholas

Be Prepared, you may be confused..but to be honest The Nature Of Nicholas is one of the most creative and innovative films I have watched in a long time. It is an avante-garde surreal masterpiece of reality and hallucination that is like The Wonder Years on acid. It's ideas and themes may be familiar..but the way Erbach deals with them is fantastic. This film may not be for everyone, but for all of you who love to see something new in film making watch it if you can.

Jeff Erbach is a great new Canadian director who is reminiscent in the likes of David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin & David Lynch.

When i stop and i think about it, this is the first movie i've ever watched that was explicitly and straightforwardly queer. i found it in youtube when i was about 15, and i will never forget the profound emotion and connection i've felt with it. not only it was about something i was feeling, but it also was such a mesmerizing experience. today, 6 years later, its power is still very strong.

the whole thing feels like a dream, a nightmare, to be precise. there is density and tension in the atmosphere, highlighted by a disturbingly slow (and purposefully unnatural) pace.

the cinematography is foggy and blurred, and the camera movements and editing are fluid and slow, giving the visuals an uneven, unrealistic and nostalgic feel. the sound design has an amateurish and experimental quality that suits the film very well too, with loud, opressive ambiences (constant clocks, crickets and insects) and a haunting noise-like music to go with it.

combine all of that, with beautiful and infinite praire landscapes, great performances from all the cast, influences of body horror, doppelganger horror and surrealism, and a strong nod to magical realism: what you get it's not only a mere lgbtq+ film, but a QUEER film that defies the logic of reality and fantasy, and very acurately portrays the queer childhood and the nightmare it can become. one of my favorites, all the way.

Yes, yes we "get" it Jeff, but let's get a little real here, shall we? When people talk of the pathetic state of English Canadian cinema, this is the film they are referring to. And the director's faux naive "Gee, I really don't know what to say about my own film," pose, is, let's face it, just that. He has thousands of words to explain why he can't or won't explain the creative decisions he has made so, please spare us the "artiste" attitude. You, sir, are no artist. You have a short film idea blown up into a bombastic and obvious turgid wallow in your own psycho sexual confusion - except it doesn't even feel authentic. Take a simple film of sexual ambiguity like, Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho." A simple tale, borrowed from Shakespeare, about street kids testing, experimenting - and each beat, each frame is charged with all the delicious meaningful ambiguity that escapes this film. What do we get instead? Arbitrariness. Capriciousness. Confusion. Oh, but it's all super clear to the director? Good for him! We all thought that the age of the navel-gazing, nebulous "Canadian" bore- fest films were over, but sadly, the age lives on in Winnepeg. And I put the über-precious, constructivist Guy Maddin in the same bucket - what Nancy-boy, and he's not even gay! This film has such a tiny truth to reveal, such a small-minded, blinkered, pedestrian notion of adolescent sexual confusion, but somehow this misguided auteur and obvious member N.A.M.B.L.A., convinced a whole series of funders to back this project. What happened, Maddin come up dry on that funding go-round? I try to imagine some visitor to Canada checking into his motel room and turning on MPix and stumbling over this over-worked, tepid dross and wondering, "This must be what pass for independent cinema in this country. Poor souls!" And because Astral put money into it, they feel obliged to play it over and over... death by a thousand insipid cuts of mindless nonsense. And you, you reviewers, gushing breathlessly over this misfire - get out much, do you? Out there on the wind-swept prairies? Here's a clue - a shot of a wheat field, is a shot of a wheat field. Not a portal to the ineffable. and here's a clue for Jeff - when next you decide to write a script, and get puzzled looks from those who read it, take it to heart. Next time, why don't you write something outside yourself, just for once - why? I'm gonna give you the gift of truth. If you were Buñuel, if you were Goddard (in his prime) or Eisenstein, or J.M.E.C. Cocteau, or Rimbaud, or even Patty Smith, if you had an interesting life, an original thought or were just a really fun guy, then maybe what comes out of your head, that is so clear to you, but which you just can't explain, might be worth looking at. But, you're not. Not even close. You don't have a point of view worth looking at or listening to. It is base, dull, unimaginative and worse, banal. You bore with your reluctance to really grapple with what's in front of you. You mince around when you should be tearing it up. You lack spine and guts and conviction. You are stubborn but, that's a poor substitute for having something important to say. Do all of Canada, and Winnipeg a big favour and stop making films.

When we grow up we throw away our old personality we've become too big for like a snake crawls out of its old skin leaving behind a dry slough. So The Nature of Nicholas is a parable about coming of age when the boy should cast away his old, already dead nature to continue on the way into his adult life. Visual design of this drama in demonstrating this idea is absolutely unusual and innovative to the degree of becoming surreal. Don't you know the song "Lose This Skin" by The Clash: "Come with me, I thought he said, but that's not him anymore, he's dead. What's it like to be so free? So free it looks like lost to me. I've got to lose this skin I'm imprisoned in." The Nature of Nicholas is like an elaborate music video to this song.

Quite near to being the greatest work of art I've seen in the film medium.

One of the users here complained about cardboard characters, which is absurd--would you complain that the characters in a ballet or a symphony are too simple? This film flows like only the greatest works of art do, and its characters serve as part of the complex texture and intent of the film as a whole, rather than being "creations in themselves" (this is a surreal and stylized film, and its also one of the few genuine mythic works that has been brought to the screen--the characters are exactly as they need to be to pull this off, and to pull of the thematic intent of the film). Each performance is also breathtaking in its ability to capture the awkwardness of the moment--an essential feature of reality that few movies achieve; this is particularly important to the period of adolescence that this film captures (and does so better than anything I've seen); the awkwardness of sexual awakening is a painful and mythic thing, and this film has insight to offer on the true nature of that time in our lives, a time that it is difficult to perceive or remember objectively (and certainly difficult to express--nearly impossible i would say, if I hadn't seen this film with my own eyes!). This film is indeed a surreal and mythic expression of the "true nature" of that time. Some have focused on the homosexual element, but I think in the film it only served to highlight the transgressive sense of one's first sexual feelings (which is also expressed by the decay and monster metaphors that crop up), and on the idea that we are sexually connected to everyone, be it our best friends or mothers (which is something we eventually move beyond in order to grow up); this film was definitely not trying to make a *point* out of the gay element--it was just there naturally, and as a part of the confused friendship of the two boys, both discovering and fearing their sexuality (whether it is a straight or gay sexuality--it is almost irrelevant).

Regarding the sense of the awkward silence and the uncertain space between people who have trouble relating, the filmaker is clearly influenced by the rest of Canadian cinema (which has always had a particularly realistic sense of people interactions), and specifically by David Cronenberg (in more ways than one!)... and yet he has already transcended his influences to arrive at a completely new and higher style (despite the fact that this is his first film!). Cronenberg has never achieved anything quite so pure in intent or as mythic in story (some have called this a fable), or as "perfectly constructed" in structure and execution (in terms of the pacing of the acting, perfectly framed shots, and the sense that every tiny element of the film is chosen so to expresses the film's central ideas--it is a powerfully coherent work, in a way that most film is scattered and messy, usually without being aware of its own clumsiness). A final point about this awkward space between people--the film takes it to a stylized extreme that is a delight to watch (there is no doubt the film is one of the most stylized things i've seen--which is a GOOD thing, of course, and makes for fascinating performances--but in doing so it actually captures the emotional reality of what it depicts better than any "realistic" portrayal could have--in this way it is similar to a surprising television show called "Buffy the vampire slayer"). There is this incredible pacing in the awkward silences, dialogue withholding about as long as it possibly could, but then breaking the tension at the exact moment where it feels like it should; this is where the film flows like music, as all great films should--you can feel and almost see the tension flowing through the scenes; it made me smile through almost the entire movie, how well they captured the difficulting in reaching out to other people, to very degrees and for various reasons (the awkwardness that exists between the main character and the other characters has a different flavour in each case, and a different cause--his awkwardness with his best friend is the most fascinating, of course, and the most human, since his best friend is the only person, other than his dead father, that could hope to understand him--and yet he fears he may not be able to relate to his friend after all).

A final point about the characters--the only character that needs to be truly fleshed out, in order for this work of art to capture what it intends to, is the young boy, for this is HIS world, and his mind that we enter (his mother and most other characters are of course frighteningly distant from what this young boy is going through, and are thus acted that way--the side performances are brilliantly formal, I might say, again thinking of the ballet or music analogy, to think of the perfection of choreography in the gestures and tones of voice, especially on the part of the mother). And the young boy is indeed fleshed out! I have never seen so sensitive and delicate a performance (or so sensitive a film as a whole, for that matter); this young actor easily replaces Haley Joel Osmand, in my books, as the best child actor who has ever been (though of course we must see if he can pull this off consistently).

Much more can be said, but I must stop for now. But one final comment--this is the sort of film that creates a whole other universe of reality, completely consistent unto itself, right down to the impressive art design of the furniture, the colour schemes, the glowing cinematography. The place it takes you to is completely unique, and is quite far outside the look and feel of any style or genre we are familiar with; this is a new place, my friends--the world has found a rare new filmaker who does not simply re-arrange the old, or flash fancy tricks at us--this is filmaker with old world mastery combined with a completely fresh vision.

Note: As a comparison, here are my other top 10 films of 2002: Atanarjuat (aka "The Fast Runner"), Heaven (by Tykwer + Kieslowski), Full Frontal (Steven Soderbergh), Happy Times (Zhang Yimou), Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, Ararat, Road to Perdition, Human Nature, and *possibly* The Hours. NONE of those films has the extreme sensitivity or "perfect" sense of flow that Nicholas achieves (which doesn't *necessarily* make it better, but it's one of many reasons why it is at the top of my list).

My list of the best works of 2001 included: Yi Yi ("one and two"), In the Mood for Love, Waking Life, Memento, Mulholland Drive, The Man Who Wasn't There, and Amores Perros. "Nicholas" is on the same level as the best of these (when films get to that level, I don't like rating them against eachother, so I'll restrict myself to saying that it's "on the same level"). 10 / 10