director: tim southam

peter outerbridge, joanne kelly, jonathan scarfe

Tim Southam’s movie version of David Adams Richards’ novel The Bay of Love and Sorrows might have, if the director been a bit less tasteful, been a gruesome piece of work, a train wreck of tragedy and death flowing over from literary horrorshow to cinematic melodrama. The tragedy of Southam’s film is that it didn’t, that his taste and dramatic prudence robs The Bay of Love and Sorrows of its real power.

Richards’ novel, like most of his work, is set in the rural Miramichi area of New Brunswick, among lonely, desperate, and sometimes brutalized and dangerous young people. It’s the early 70s, and Michael Skid (Jonathan Scarfe), a spoiled judge’s son, has decided to share the warmed-over communitarian ideals of sexual freedom and anti-materialism he’s brought back from his travels, along with a healthy supply of drugs, with a group of young locals.

He befriends Everette (Peter Outerbridge), a brutal ex-con, who flatters Michael with his enthusiasm for Michael’s hippie idealism, while drawing him into a big drug deal, along with Madonna and Silver Broussard, the brother and sister outcasts of the community. Michael’s idyll also draws in Carrie (Elaine Cassidy), the naive fiancé of Michael’s onetime friend, Tom, a stalwart young farmer. When Everette steals all of their money to put his drug deal in motion, everything spirals murderously out of control, or at least it does in Richards’ original novel.

Richards’ stories, while literary in reputation, are imbued with a crushing and inexorable sense of tragedy found more often in potboilers, a huge machinery of constantly underlined, impending doom that overtakes all of his characters, nowhere more so than in Bay of Love and Sorrows. For reasons of cinematic economy, Southam abridges Richards’ book, cutting characters and subplots, shrinking the timeline and, in sparing the life of a character, crucially altering the ending and overall tone of the story, dessicating the atmosphere of awful, even lugubrious suffering that’s something of a Richards signature.

Since the novelist collaborated with the director on the screenplay, it would be unfair to blame Southam entirely, but it only makes the result more perplexing. It’s as if Richards was persuaded to draw back from the physical and emotional brutality of his book, somehow unable to acknowledge how essential it is to making his characters so vivid. And so Everette’s real evil, Carrie’s unearned pride, Michael’s irresponsibility and especially Madonna’s cursed beauty - played frustratingly well by Joanne Kelly - are pale things, made bloodless by yet another Canadian’s film’s mortal fear of melodrama.