Illustration titled "Bart Davis's Dance" from George W. Harris's Sut Lovingood's Yarns, 1867
So I'm going to be seeing about six shows at Sundance this year, and I plan to write about all of them. Just to give you advance warning. The first show of the Festival is always special, and this year was no exception. I'm glad my special lady friend and I decided to see a "small film" for our first movie this year - the combination of low expectations and high enthusiasm made the screening of Grown Up Movie Star a better experience than it would have been to, say, catch it on the Sundance Channel at 3:00 AM. But maybe I'm just equivocating because I think that I shouldn't have liked this movie as much as I did. I liked it a lot.
It can't have hurt that Big Love's Shawn Doyle (he plays Bill's brother Joey if you watch that show) got up before the movie started and thanked us for coming. I thought it was odd that he would do that until I realized that he was the star of Grown Up Movie Star - I didn't even know that he was from Newfoundland! Set in that least-appreciated of Canada's maritime provinces, the movie features a cast and crew with quite of bit experience in Canadian TV. Writer and first-time director Adriana Maggs does a good job of translating the good aspects of her TV experience to a movie that makes the most of its limited scope and resources, focusing on intimate moments and gentle but incisive funny-because-its-true humor.
Grown Up Movie Star is about a small-town family of "Newfies" made up of a failed hockey pro, Ray (Doyle), his wannabe-actress wife, Lillian, and their two preteen daughters. Lillian makes her exit as the movie starts, explaining to her older daughter Ruby (Tatiana Maslany) that she is going to Hollywood to become famous, leaving the girls with Ray. Ruby is deeply affected by her mother's departure, realizing that (at 13) she is close enough to being a woman to start interacting with the world in a new way. Meanwhile, Ray, an NHL flameout making a living building houses, is also hit hard by his wife's departure - he is forced to reevaluate his life and, particularly, his sexuality in a new context.
The parallel sexual metamorphoses of Ray and his daughter Ruby are central to Grown Up Movie Star, but they are also the film's weakest element. The whole set-up is too obvious, and a key sequence halfway through the movie really, REALLY hits you over the head with, "See - the two of them are going through the same thing!" That's really my only major complaint about the movie, though. The cast and script are very good - the actors and the writing are both very affectionate toward the characters and subject matter, and Maggs usually errs on the side of tasteful understatement. For a sexual-awakening story, Grown Up Movie Star relies on low-key humor to a surprising degree, and it works well, more than making up for a couple moments of melodrama. Also, the look of the movie is quite good, creating an effective "real-life" feel by using a frozen Newfoundland village for its setting without going overboard with obvious signifiers or stylistic touches.
Doyle and Maslany's performances are really what make Grown Up Movie Star better than it should be, though - they work together as the two sides of the film's thematic axis, interacting with a very real father-daughter dynamic and drawing the audience into their lives. Maslany is particularly impressive. When she got up with the rest of the cast (the whole cast!) for a Q&A at the end of the show, she revealed that she is 24, more than a decade older than her preteen character, and the crowd gasped audibly - she was just that good. Seeing the whole cast in that little screening room may be why I came away from this movie with such a positive impression - they all came down to Sundance as a group of Newfies that made a made a great little film about a Newfie family, and they were excited that people were enjoying what they'd made.
"Family Happiness" by the Mountain Goats
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