Movie Review, 'Whole New Thing' GEOFF PEVERE – Toronto Star
Whole New Thing opens with a nocturnal event of the kind that seldom gets talked about in public, let alone in movies.
But in the household in which it takes place, a hand-build, eco-sensitive dwelling in rural Nova Scotia that provides physical if not emotional shelter for Rog (Robert Joy), his wife Kaya (Rebecca Jenkins), and their long-haired, smarter-than-thou, home-schooled teenage son Emerson (Aaron Webber), a wet dream is just another event to be taken in casual, anything-goes bohemian stride.
But the apparent ease with which the event is accepted is kind of like the spontaneous nature of the thing itself. There's a lot more going on than what meets the sheets.
York University screenwriting teacher Amnon Buchbinder's film, his second since The Fishing Trip in 1998, is a smart, delicate and funny examination of human contradictions, and especially of the often messy manner in which desires tend to trump principles.
In the same way that the hyper-intelligent Emerson's cool mastery of his domain is increasingly betrayed by his body's bursting needs, nearly everyone in this deftly off-centre comedy is struggling to keep their impulses from blowing their covers.
Kaya, whom Rebecca Jenkins plays as a once vivacious free spirit who has been dampened by her husband's crusading self-absorption (he's trying to devise a way of making energy from human excrement), finds herself suddenly tumbling into bed with the local Lothario played by Callum Keith Rennie.
Don Grant (played by playwright, actor and filmmaker Daniel MacIvor), the dryly disengaged middle-aged man who will become not only Emerson's first teacher but first object of full-blown romantic obsession, has been content to ventilate his homosexual impulses in a series of anonymous sexual encounters in a roadside public washroom. This, too, will find a way of spilling over.
While Whole New Thing has much to boast in terms of execution — the performances, including that of the newcomer Webber in an exceedingly challenging role, are uniformly pitch-perfect, as is Christopher Ball's gracefully intimate camerawork and David Buchbinder's understated score — the thing that makes it truly simmer is Buchbinder and MacIvor's script and the generosity with which it observes people at their most nakedly desperate and helpless.
(Indeed, the movie's opening credit setting is the sauna in which Rog, Kaya and Emerson share another unremarkably nude family moment.)
There's an exquisitely performed scene where Don describes the difference between comedy and tragedy to his class and in the process reveals his sublimated autobiography, and another where Joy's Rog flares up at a potluck supper only to realize he's got more anger in him than even his genius can find words to express.
Yet as easy as it would be to ridicule any of these people — or to treat the young man's crush on his mortified gay teacher as an opportunity for high sensation — Whole New Thing maintains precisely the kind of cool and calculated composure that its characters only wish they had.
As this movie suggests, there's a trick to making us care about people who so consistently do the wrong thing, and it involves asking a certain amount of forgiveness: of the characters and of ourselves.
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Whole New Thing opens with a nocturnal event of the kind that seldom gets talked about in public, let alone in movies.
But in the household in which it takes place, a hand-build, eco-sensitive dwelling in rural Nova Scotia that provides physical if not emotional shelter for Rog (Robert Joy), his wife Kaya (Rebecca Jenkins), and their long-haired, smarter-than-thou, home-schooled teenage son Emerson (Aaron Webber), a wet dream is just another event to be taken in casual, anything-goes bohemian stride.
But the apparent ease with which the event is accepted is kind of like the spontaneous nature of the thing itself. There's a lot more going on than what meets the sheets.
York University screenwriting teacher Amnon Buchbinder's film, his second since The Fishing Trip in 1998, is a smart, delicate and funny examination of human contradictions, and especially of the often messy manner in which desires tend to trump principles.
In the same way that the hyper-intelligent Emerson's cool mastery of his domain is increasingly betrayed by his body's bursting needs, nearly everyone in this deftly off-centre comedy is struggling to keep their impulses from blowing their covers.
Kaya, whom Rebecca Jenkins plays as a once vivacious free spirit who has been dampened by her husband's crusading self-absorption (he's trying to devise a way of making energy from human excrement), finds herself suddenly tumbling into bed with the local Lothario played by Callum Keith Rennie.
Don Grant (played by playwright, actor and filmmaker Daniel MacIvor), the dryly disengaged middle-aged man who will become not only Emerson's first teacher but first object of full-blown romantic obsession, has been content to ventilate his homosexual impulses in a series of anonymous sexual encounters in a roadside public washroom. This, too, will find a way of spilling over.
While Whole New Thing has much to boast in terms of execution — the performances, including that of the newcomer Webber in an exceedingly challenging role, are uniformly pitch-perfect, as is Christopher Ball's gracefully intimate camerawork and David Buchbinder's understated score — the thing that makes it truly simmer is Buchbinder and MacIvor's script and the generosity with which it observes people at their most nakedly desperate and helpless.
(Indeed, the movie's opening credit setting is the sauna in which Rog, Kaya and Emerson share another unremarkably nude family moment.)
There's an exquisitely performed scene where Don describes the difference between comedy and tragedy to his class and in the process reveals his sublimated autobiography, and another where Joy's Rog flares up at a potluck supper only to realize he's got more anger in him than even his genius can find words to express.
Yet as easy as it would be to ridicule any of these people — or to treat the young man's crush on his mortified gay teacher as an opportunity for high sensation — Whole New Thing maintains precisely the kind of cool and calculated composure that its characters only wish they had.
As this movie suggests, there's a trick to making us care about people who so consistently do the wrong thing, and it involves asking a certain amount of forgiveness: of the characters and of ourselves.
Back to articles