>>REVIEW
A SIMPLE CURVE
STARRING Kris Lemche and Michael Hogan
DIRECTED BY Aubrey Nealon
Opens Friday, February 17
Uptown Screen
A refreshing take on an overused theme of daddy issues (here presented without tissues) starts gently and gets more compelling as it glides along like a woodsmith’s sharpened plane over smooth surfaces.
Joan of Arcadia veteran Kris Lemche gets an impressive workout as Caleb, a handsome and crankily articulate 27-year-old who hasn’t yet been able to break away from home. Context is the only thing conveying the fact that his woodworking partner, Jim (Michael Hogan), is actually his dad – the film is almost half over before any family beans are spilled. Caleb’s innate restlessness is exacerbated when perfectionist Jim turns down lucrative but esthetically dubious work in B.C.’s Slocan Valley. Then dad’s old friend and rival Matthew (Matt Craven) flies his own aircraft into the remote area, looking to build a luxury lodge and stir up trouble for Jim, who has stayed much truer to their hippie ways.
Caleb has recently struck up a tentative relationship with a pretty single mom (Pascale Hutton), but she considers him a flight risk – something made more apparent when a couple of granola types (Kett Turton and Sarah Lind) pitch a teepee on his land, and the female of the duo gives him a pup tent of a different kind. These muddied waters dimly reflect the lad’s own confusing origins, as Jim hints at in revelations about his own early days with Caleb’s mom – whose story is never used for sentimental effect here.
The film’s ensemble cast is uniformly strong, even if Hogan sounds too Canuck to be a Yankee draft dodger. And Vancouver writer-director Aubrey Nealon’s dialogue is sharply amusing without resorting to sitcom wisecracks. Indeed, Caleb’s smart mouth tends to shield him from reality at times –something he seems to dimly recognize.
Equally affecting is David Geddes’s varied cinematography, which takes viewers in deep and high above the gorgeous Kootenays, with sparse music providing needed lifts in the mood. The film’s open ending is quietly satisfying, and you come away from Curve surprised that Nealon’s hands have not been calloused by making features before this tartly lyrical ode to country life, limitations and all. |
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