by Thom Fitzgerald, 1997.
Starring Christine Dunsworth, Kerry Fox, Joel S. Keller, Chris Leavins, Peter MacNeill, Seana McKenna, Joan Orenstein, Sarah Polley, Troy Veinotte.
Rating: 6.5/10, 8/10.
There are four basic kinds of movies. They are 1.) the ones that don’t try at all, 2.) the ones that try, but not hard enough, 3.) the ones that get it just right, and 4.) the ones that try too hard. On these standards, I would say that The Hanging Garden ranks about a three-and-three-quarters, maybe a three-and-a-half.
Of course, I would much rather watch a movie of the fourth kind than one of the first or, usually, the second. Which is why I recommend The Hanging Garden. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and what it wants to do is good and valuable. It just runs into problems—some problems, anyway—in the actual execution.
The story focuses on William (Leavins as an adult, Veinotte as a teenager), who ran away from home when, at age fifteen, his parents caught him with another boy, in flagrante delicto as one might say. As the film opens ten years later, he is returning home for the first time to see his sister Rosemary (adult – Fox, teenager – Polley) get married. Interestingly enough, the man she’s marrying is Fletcher (Keller), who happens to be the very same boy that William was caught with all those years ago. When he returns, he finds that he has a young sister, Violet (Dunsworth) that he didn’t know about, and whose presence confuses him, as his parents (MacNeill and McKenna) despise one another.
I said he ran away from home. And he did. But, well, I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to make of this literally, but at least one VERSION of him didn’t. Instead, this version of the fifteen-year-old William hanged himself in the garden in the backyard (hence the title of the film). This event—or possible event, or whatever—left such a strong impact on his family and the environment that it actually repeats, every day. Every day, the teenage William, or perhaps an image of him, goes out into the backyard and hangs himself, and his father weeps over him.
Of course, this is a literal extrapolation of the notion that traumatic events haunt the memories of those who have gone through them. As such, it works, and manages not to be trite and obvious. However, at times it does get a little overdone. Rosemary has two revelations in store for her brother, and both, while necessary for the film to work, make me wish that the writers hadn’t written themselves into the corner that made them necessary. They push the film slightly over that narrow edge that one walks while achieving greatness. Another one of these narrative corners is the scene where William’s parents take him to the local prostitute. In a movie where three different versions of one man can appear in one scene, that was far too unbelievable.
I don’t mean to sound overly negative. This film is quite an achievement, and I for one am glad that (thanks to the indispensable Matt Mullen) I got the chance to see it. These problems that I have with the film are the flaws in...er...oh, hell, something good that has a few flaws. And that utterly horrible sentence brings me right into the next thing that I was going to say, which is this: most of the time when a movie has problems, I can point at it and say, "if I were making this, I would have done this and this and this differently to make it better," but in this case, well, I’d be about as good as improving it as I was writing that sentence. The writers did write themselves into a corner, but as far as I can see, it was not an avoidable corner. In order to make this movie, that addresses these issues (and I haven’t even mentioned the religious issues, the other family problems, the contrast between the obese teenage William and the skinny—possibly even anorexic—adult one, and so many other items of discussion in the film), those were inevitable. In a way, perhaps this means that the movie should not have been made (if it is impossible to make a movie without making it overdone at times, is it worth making?), but clearly that is not the answer; this movie had to be made and I am glad it was.
I would talk next about the acting, and how I thought it was a bit uneven, but once again I don’t know how to talk about it without sounding more negative than I want to. The acting was not the best—the performances of the vast majority of the actors was consistently good enough with moments where you could see better than that, and Leavins’s was a mix of great moments and oddly inept ones (his extended reaction to one of his sister’s revelations is almost funny, at a time when humor is most definitely not desirable). However, the film has a sort of quality that tells me that the acting is not what I’m supposed to be looking at, and therefore—it’s not. I’m not sure how to describe it. This is a very strange movie, that did bizarre things to my head as I was watching it.
Maybe it’s just a good, but not great, movie. Maybe I’m making too big a deal of it. But I think, perhaps, that I am not. I think it is an important film, certainly, or at least would be if anyone ever saw it.