***½/**** Image C Sound B Extras A
starring Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood, Cayle Chernin
screenplay by William Fruet & Donald Shebib
directed by Donald Shebib
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As close to a classic as Canadian cinema gets, Donald Shebib's Goin' Down the Road touches greatness without really trying; its virtue lies in its refusal to force things, eschewing the jackhammer editing and hard-lined composition of traditional cinema in favour of a hazy, genial approach to its look and feel. Under regular Northern circumstances, this would be a liability: our country's inability to make conscious aesthetic choices has reduced more than a few films to a thin bland soup. But here it works like gangbusters, passively recording the protagonists' misadventures with a combination of helplessness and sympathy as they thrash about, trying to claim an American dream in the midst of a Canadian nightmare. It's simple, lovely, and heartbreaking, and it makes you wonder how Shebib could have somehow managed to disappear into obscurity.
A man went looking for Canada, and he couldn't find it anywhere: Goin' Down the Road exchanges Wyatt and Billy's flight from a fraudulent national identity for Peter (Doug McGrath) and Joey (Paul Bradley) charting a collision course with same. They're a couple of cannery workers from Nova Scotia who are sick of the grind and want a better life, thus they pile into their boat of a car and drive to Toronto to seek their fortune. The two are in for a rude shock. Lacking education or skills, they get shut out from the prosperity they so badly want; the best they can manage is a job on a Molson's assembly line, doing the same job they always did at slightly higher pay. And all around them, money taunts them–if not in the untouchable and unresponsive form of the boss's gorgeous daughter, then in the image of the consumer goods that drew them to Hogtown in the first place, leading to furnishings on layaway that are dangled and, after they lose their jobs, cruelly snatched away.
It's a classically Canadian story of failure and alienation, and as such, it walks a dangerous line: fall over and you blame the victim for trying anything at all, as so many hoser flicks have done before and since. But while Peter and Joey remain steadfastly unconscious of the nature of their problem, Shebib and co-scribe William Fruet have their finger on its pulse. Taken to its logical conclusion, it makes for a damning comment on the Canadian way of life. Far from embodying the all-inclusive group hug of national mythology, the Toronto and Canada of Goin' Down the Road are places where you can disappear without anyone noticing–and where being noticed means having money and position. While the film stops short of a proper critique (it's too ground-level to offer one), it at least offers a genuine protest against the lie of Canadian cant.
Goin' Down the Road is not, however, an angry film–it's more sorrowful than bitter, and it's here that its aesthetics set it apart. In its hands-off kind of way, the picture achieves a tender, foggy style that keeps even its bleakest moments from crushing the spectator. Shebib takes the position that just because the world seeks to destroy Pete and Joey, that doesn't mean that the filmmakers have to, thus the look of the film is very soft and earthy, finding pleasure in the presence of the characters instead of the forces that knock them about. We take pleasure in their pleasure, even as they take pleasure in things that will undo them. It's in this ironic interplay between wanting them to succeed and the unworthiness of such success that the film gets its edge and its uniqueness. One should stop short of calling it a masterpiece: it's not analytical enough for such an honour, which belongs more deservedly to precision wingnuts like David Cronenberg. But if Cronenberg is making Citizen Kane, Shebib has at least achieved a Casablanca, an emblematic film that encapsulates a way of thinking with craft and intelligence.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Seville, the Canadian home video distributor, presents a fullscreen transfer of Goin' Down the Road–"digitally remastered from the print restored by The National Archives of Canada in 1999"–on DVD under their "Signature Collection" banner. Alas, no certifiable miracles took place: the 16mm production looks scratchy, with overzealous noise-reduction techniques filtering out not only grain but also detail; the resultant interlace artifact wreaks mild havoc on sharp edges. Colours are extremely muted by design, though that doesn't make them any more appealing. I was startled, however, by the clarity of the "Dolby 2.0 Stereo" audio, and despite an absence of attention-getting panning effects, I'd be surprised to discover that this isn't a remix with re-recorded music and effects.
Although the disc is light on supplementary material, all of it is fascinating. Director Don Shebib contributes a feature-length, screen-specific commentary in which he provides endless trivia, from the fact of Carroll Ballard's second-unit work (Ballard would go on to have a higher-profile directing career than Shebib) to the legitimacy of each location. He's less reluctant to discuss Goin' Down the Road in thematic terms as the track wears on, while Canadian critic Geoff Pevere (a personal fave) explores the picture's symbolic gestures in a separate solo yakker. Blatantly wistful for an era that could produce such an animal as Goin' Down the Road, Pevere is particularly adept at breaking down the character of Pete and the visual motifs that follow him throughout Shebib's film.
Access from the Special Features menu a discomfiting, well-preserved time capsule: an episode of Canadian author Pierre Berton's self-named talk show from 1971 guest-starring a youthful (and youthful-sounding) Shebib, wherein both parties refer to the "totally unknown" It's a Wonderful Life! The condescending host dwells on Shebib's distaste for the written word (he can't seem to ask a question that doesn't begin, "You mean to tell me that…"), dismisses Shebib's desire to helm a "period baseball picture" as ludicrous (wonder what he thought of Eight Men Out seventeen years later), and calls Fritz Lang's M a Russian classic. (M is, of course, as German as Oktoberfest sausage.) By the end of the twenty-four minutes, a browbeaten Shebib has coiled up into an impenetrable ball; O Canada, indeed. A gallery of crisp black-and-white production stills plus a handsome insert booklet finish off this commendable package.
90 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo); DVD-9; Region One; Seville
