C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) – DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras N/A
starring Michel Côté, Marc-André Grondin, Danielle Proulx, Pierre-Luc Brillant
written and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The emotional epic that Canada deserves but never gets has finally arrived. There are no finger-wagging lessons here, no sluggish trudges through masochistic misery, no pointless abstractions hammered home a few too many times–only the sense that, despite the constant, agonizing gauntlet one runs in a lifetime, it's all worth it in the long, ecstatic view. C.R.A.Z.Y. isn't interested in wallowing in misery, though its narrative has plenty of that: instead, it's cheerleading the endless struggle to get what you need, and its refusal to acquiesce or admit defeat makes it a special movie. That it comes from Quebec is entirely predictable (although their last crossover success, The Barbarian Invasions, was about a suicide); what isn't predictable is how charged, how unpretentious, and how light on its feet it is even for Canada's provincial hotbed of film talent. C.R.A.Z.Y. suggests we might be good for something other than fictional defeat and documentaries on Paul Anka.

It could have very easily gone another way. The decades-spanning narrative of the Beaulieu clan is full of the kind of stifling family life on which our country's cinema has depended: Dad Gervais (Michel Côté) is a super-loud blowhard unaware of his own power, while Mom Laurianne (Danielle Proulx) is religious and worrisome, making it that much more unpleasant for Christmas-born Zachary (Marc-André Grondin), doomed to be young, and angry, and also quite gay. The film turns on Zachary's growing pains in a house with a Patsy Cline-loving patriarch who sires him in 1960 and then spends the next several years misunderstanding him completely. (It doesn't help that Zac's fierce macho brothers tend to blow off the more reasonable sounds of the mother hen.) Zac will have to fight for his place in the world with whatever comes to hand, which won't always be ethical, truthful, or pain-free.

Why, then, does the movie have the type of jolt we usually associate with Martin Scorsese when he's really on? Like that other magic-Catholic sensibility, writer-director Jean-Marc Vallée deals in feelings with physical presence. He's the sort of filmmaker who can raise a person off the ground during high mass as the congregation sings "Sympathy for the Devil" without collapsing into preciousness or self-consciousness; while his images often flirt with greeting-card extroversion, he's savvy enough to never actually cross the line. As Zac grows up and sees the mess he's been handed, he blots out the world with Bowie and Floyd, paints his face like Aladdin Sane, and dreams of the life he'd rather be living. The film is about the search for paradise rather than the implacability of Hell, and it has you soaring even as the events seem dire.

C.R.A.Z.Y. isn't all moral pronouncements about the dealers of pain, either. Gervais is as much admired for his charismatic juice as for his ill-advised parental decisions; he may embarrass his kids at Christmas parties by warbling along to Charles Aznavour records, but the film admires his zest for life and will to be. And nobody really gets away clean in this movie: not our hero Zac, who finds himself a girlfriend as a front for his sexuality, thus causing himself a serious amount of hardship; and certainly not his drug-dealing/using brother Christian (Maxime Tremblay), a downward spiral waiting to happen. You want to embrace or reject certain members of the cast, yet you can't quite: their good qualities are inseparable from their bad ones, requiring something like a system reboot to resolve them properly. As these people entangle themselves in each other's problems, the issue becomes less about blame and more about unkinking contradictions.

This is the movie that Cameron Crowe was gunning for with Almost Famous but never achieved: a rock-infused remembrance of things past tinged with the regret of innocence lost. Though Vallée is, like Crowe, a properly sensuous filmmaker with a good sense of the pop-cultural firmament, he also knows that letting go of innocence doesn't mean losing blamelessness, but rather giving up your more strident convictions: as father and son careen towards something resembling reconciliation, it's obvious that both have to give up something to gain something better. In order to do that, however, they have to keep fighting, keep working for the elusive clarity they desperately need. C.R.A.Z.Y. is that rarest of beasts: a film not about failure, but about momentary failures on the road to a very humbling triumph.

THE DVD
TVA's English-Canada DVD release of C.R.A.Z.Y. shows the film to good advantage. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced image boasts excellent, subtle colour with no oversaturation or bleedthrough. Hues are vibrant without throbbing and, as a bonus, sharpness is solid, if not top-mark. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is thrillingly full, with music pounding through the subwoofer and complementing the razor-sharp dialogue. Extras include a making-of a commentary with Vallée, sound director Martin Pinsonnault, art director Patrice Bricault, and a "C.R.A.Z.Y. in Venice" featurette. Alas, they're in French-only, sans subtitles. Sorry, Anglos.

129 minutes; NR; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); French DD 5.1, French DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC (French); English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; TVA