Toronto Star Review

Nov. 5, 2004

Still families run deep

SUSAN WALKER
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

Some Things That Stay
FOUR STARS

Starring Katie Boland, Alberta Watson and Stuart Wilson. Directed by Gail Harvey. Written by Catherine Gourdier, based on the novel by Sarah Willis. 90 minutes. At Canada Square and Sheppard Grande. PG

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There are some things that will stay in mind for a long time in Toronto director Gail Harvey's latest movie, the first in which she works with her own daughter, Katie Boland.

Some Things That Stay bears the imprint of a real writer (novelist Sarah Willis, whose book is adeptly adapted by Catherine Gourdier) and a real director. That's to say that it is one of those rare family dramas, in the tradition of movies like Spike Lee's Crooklyn, that doesn't follow trends, is not a vehicle for a major pop star, and certainly wasn't cobbled together by a Hollywood pitchman to fill a perceived audience demand or well-grooved market niche.

A family film not necessarily for kids, this is a weepie without being a tearjerker, stopping just short of priming the pump with a simple story of the transient Andersons.

They're driving their Chevy stationwagon with its Georgia licence plates toward a new rural home somewhere in Canada in the film's lush opening scenes. Tamara is already griping about the family never having a home to call their own. She's 15, and would love to live for once "in a town that has sidewalks."

She and her two younger siblings settle in soon enough, however, in what turns out to be a small cattle farm abandoned by the owners after their 17-year-old son died there of leukemia. Tamara is convinced that his ghost remains in the house.

Although this is 1954, the Andersons are a radical family. Dad (Stuart Wilson) is an artist, an English landscape painter, whose art seems to come (to Tamara at least) way ahead of his family and who certainly wouldn't stoop to take a regular job. Tamara's mum (Alberta Watson) is a proto-feminist, an early civil rights campaigner, an independent woman of independent mind. Her atheist proclamations don't sit well with the local fundamentalist Christians.

Tamara's first fumbling sexual interest, in the neighbouring family's son, handsome Rusty Murphy (Kevin Zegers from the Air Bud movies) makes another subtext.

But a more serious issue divides and gravely wounds the family when Tamara's mother is found to be very ill.

Harvey, through her discerning photographer's eye (and the outstanding work of director of photography Frank Tidy), makes a painterly movie that nevertheless contains some gritty moments laden with emotion.

None of this would have been possible without the sure technique of Katie Boland, a young actor with the maturity of someone much older. Unlike most child actors she works from inside, so you're never conscious of her acting with a capital A.

Alberta Watson turns in, as always, the kind of performance that makes an unusually strong fictional woman credible. She is well cast against Stuart Wilson (The Mask Of Zorro), an English actor who plays the overbearing husband and father with the vulnerable centre. "I know I'm the bad guy you think I am," he tells Tamara, "but that's not all that I am."

The performances in Some Things That Stay run deep and, resoundingly, ring true.