Ah, this is the film I flew five hours to see. If this is the only good movie I see while I'm here, it will have been worth the price of the plane fare. If the point of a film, the point of Art really, is to entertain, or to educate, or to let you see things in a new way, or to let you just forget your troubles for a few minutes, The Valley Below does all that.
This is my longest day at tiff. Starting with this film at 8:30am (that's 5:30am according to my body clock), I didn't get back to my hotel until midnight. I get a gold star just for that. But this was a perfect morning movie. Even if I was still all weepy at lunch afterwards.
If I were prone to generalities, I would start to wonder if the Canadian archetype of masculinity is different from the American one. This is so refreshing after the trip to the land of the Great Male Narcicissts that was Manglehorn. This is a story about guys, and how guys relate to women. There's no unreachable women-on-pedestals, there's no fantasy of the young thing falling for the crusty old guy in spite of himself. There's just guys relating to women, trying their best to do so, even when their best isn't good enough, even when their best is actually kinda fail.
The film is shot in Alberta, in the badlands somewhere, and the location shots are beautiful, the film worships the landscape and the small town spaces, even to the point of building a miniature of the town itself, complete with its surrounding hills and bluffs, as a character's model railroad hobby in his basement. There were so many pure Canadian details that I really felt like I was watching a Canadian movie, even if now, in retrospect, they seem pretty mundane:: snow, hockey, beer, bowling, camping, deer hunting. "You can't keep screwing up like this, you've got to keep your stick on the ice," says the cop to his brother in law in the drunk tank--how classically Canadian is that?
Kyle Thomas, the writer and directory, can write. The dialog is beautiful and precise, in addition to having a great ear for the ambient sounds of the scene (the directory said that was all his sound engineer on set, very little Foley stuff afterwards), the guy has a great ear for dialog. The dialog in the scene setting up a tent, a boyfriend and girlfriend setting up their tent while camping, was just so perfectly evocative, that I asked him at the Q&A if it was all scripted or if it was one of those "we just improvised scenes", but no, it was all scripted (except for the very last line of the movie, they admitted, in the radio sound booth, that line was a joint effort: "There's nothing more important than family").
Not only can he write, but apparently he can cook too. The cast members said after a day of shooting they'd all go back to the house they were all staying in while he made pulled pork, Kyle would, with the same air of patience and unhurried calm that he shot the film in. The togetherness and comraderie that the cast obviously had during the shoot really comes out in the movie.
Anyway, I mentioned I was weepy after the movie. Yeah, that's right. I was totally absorbed by the sincerity and the honesty and the commitment to truth I saw in this movie. There's no ironic asides, no stereotypes, no exploitation. I really felt nothing but support and acceptance. The movie really spoke to me personally, and yet I have nothing in common with any of the characters except that, like them, I'm a human being, and being a human being is hard. Doing it right is hard. Some days doing it at all is hard. But I'm trying, and they're trying, and that's ok, because that's really all you can do.
Afterwards in the Lightbox cafe, it's early but I really want a beer for lunch. More local color: "Sorry, in Ontario we don't serve alcohol before 11:00." Nice.
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