by Joel
#88 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series in which I view, for the first time, some of the most critically acclaimed films of the previous decade.
My Winnipeg filters municipal history through personal experience (or perhaps vice-versa) so forgive me if I do something similar for a moment. Besides, my initial draft of this review was swept away – demolished like the old ice rink shown above – and in starting afresh, I feel compelled to make a meta-blogging and perhaps self-promotional detour. Lately I’ve been blogging rather furiously, trying to meet the demands of a new schedule I forced upon myself; as a result I am often composing my posts at the last minute (as opposed to this past summer where a leisurely pace allowed ample time to develop entries at my own tempo). Due to the way I’ve scheduled things, I end up writing a post in my Wind in the Willows series and the latest entry in “Best of the 21st Century?” every Monday night, and this week I noticed some similarities. To wit: in “Wayfarers, All,” a late and seemingly digressive chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s classic book, the Water Rat meets a Sea Rat who regales him with tales of the Mediterranean; transfixed, the hypnotized creature – who’s never left the riverside before – prepares to follow his newfound friend on a grand adventure. He is stopped, at the last minute, but his faithful but perhaps somewhat oppressive pal, Mole, who physically restrains him and then talks him down from the dizzying height of his wanderlust. Thus “cured” of his restlessness, a depressed Rat sits at his desk and scribbles out some poetry about willow wrens.
Such an instinctively hysterical response to spontaneously-formed travel plans may strike us as odd nowadays – and perhaps did so even back in 1908, when Englishmen were hardly regarded for their international timidity. Yet Grahame – himself an intensely imaginative individual chained to a desk at the Bank of England – no doubt related to Rat’s restraint, either with bitter irony or wistful resignation. They say you can’t go home again, but to many people that might seem more like a hopeful promise than a plaintive regret. As we are introduced to him in My Winnipeg, seated on an old-fashioned engine rumbling out of town as fast as it can go (and informing us that he’s fleeing the town of his birth for good), it would appear that Guy Maddin is one of those people. Actually “introduced” is misleading – we never see Maddin onscreen (at least as far as I’m aware), and while we do witness a representative figure squeezed into a cramped train car, watching Winnipeg speed by his window, this visual is only a sort of totem, there to give us an impressionistic sense of Guy’s mental state. The real Guy is behind the camera and on the soundtrack, narrating throughout – hardly any dialogue, and certainly neither talking heads nor man-on-the-street interviews clutter up this “documentary.”
And “documentary” must be in quotes. The recent epoch was the decade of the doc, with the form so popular that filmmakers better known for fiction made what many consider to be their best work in nonfiction. Spike Lee, with When the Levees Broke, would be one example; Agnes Varda another, with The Gleaners & I. Maddin would seem to fit in with this crowd; many of his most acclaimed films – in recent years, Brand Upon the Brain!, The Saddest Music in the World – are resolutely fantasist, wearing their artifice with pride. They incorporate silent-film intertitles, charmingly fabricated sets, and a narration (sometimes meant to be presented as a live accompaniment) far more intoxicated by the possibilities of elaborate hoax and legend than any duty to truth-telling. Well, so does My Winnipeg – yet it is also stuffed with fascinating facts about the Canadian city, structured around recollections of Maddin’s childhood, and filled with vintage footage of the wacky town in action. And even if 90% of this fantasy/documentary/memoir movie is a work of fiction, what remains would still be enough to render Winnipeg’s history remarkably eccentric – though possibly no more so than any other city privileged to hold a Maddin as local historian.
It’s hard to say, or hard for me to say anyway, what Guy Maddin made up and what he didn’t – in a way one doesn’t want to know. We can be fairly certain that, for fifty years, Winnipeg’s only dramatic series has not been a show called “Ledge Man,” in which Maddin’s mother (playing the part since 1959) portrays a woman talking her son down from a ledge every week, convincing him not to kill himself, only for him to become suicidal again in time for next week’s episode. Fairly certain of its fiction, of course, but also fairly certain of its psychological truth for Maddin and his intensely Oedipal/claustrophobic/loathing relationship with his mother and his hometown, which he often conflates. (Mama Maddin is played by Ann Savage, most famous for her ultra-fatale femme fatale in Detour, although Maddin claims on the soundtrack that this is his actual mother, hired by him to restage traumatic scenes from his youth, alongside young actors employed to portray his siblings – one of whom she falls in love with.) On the other hand, I am willing to bet on the authenticity of that tree, isolated in the middle of a roundabout and declared by Ripley’s Believe it or Not “the smallest park in the world.” (Such notoriety was a red flag for the nefarious civic government – the mercilessly, and on all the evidence deservedly, ridiculed villain of the piece – and when prevented by a linked-arm chain of old ladies from cutting the tree down, they apparently hired a vandal to dynamite it.)
And what of the rest? What of the horses who raced from a burning track in the dead of night, swimming across the wintry river until they froze, their heads poking out of the ice for the remainder of the season? What of the ghostly players, the hockey legends of Winnipeg’s youth, who play rough pick-up games in the demolished rink, ignoring the wrecking ball overhead? What of the 3-floored swimming center, a pool on each floor, with the boys on bottom running around naked all day, tormenting a youthful Guy for hours on end? What of the the elder Maddin’s death coinciding with his team’s sale to the NHL, what of Guy’s sister using a hit-and-run deer accident as an excuse to make love to a stranger, what of the Indian legends about a “fork under a fork” (in the river), the homeless citizens relegated to rooftops by a merciless government, the municipal law forbidding the disposal of old signage, what of the decadent “Golden Boy” parties thrown atop a seedy nightclub in the 1930s in which an otherwise straight-laced mayor selected the juiciest pin-up guy based on physique and handwriting? One almost suspects that the least plausible of these items are among the truest, or hopes so anyway.
At times, Maddin’s style almost seems to get in the way of his subject, so fascinating are the anecdotes and the little connections. Since Maddin’s films usually thrive on their complete and utter fantasy, there’s an uneasy tension at times between his pursuit of truth and his love of the elaborate fib – this exists less in the uncertain boundary between actuality and imagination (which is quite fertile and provocative) than in the unspoken struggle between Maddin’s flamboyant but transparently “fake” mise en scene and the unruly fascination of the reality he’s dealing with here. It seems almost unnecessary to gussy everything up so wildly – yet upon reflection, more often than not, the discursive and digressive approach complements the stories being told. If the film has a major flaw it is ultimately that maybe there isn’t enough here. One Netflix reviewer claims that the film runs out of material and repeats itself but in fact I suspect there was room for much more – and the movie might be even better if Maddin had more time to explore: this feels at times like a day trip when what we really want is a long weekend excursion into the depths of Winnipeg’s somnambulist melancholy.
One of my favorite passages in the film occurs when Maddin explores the back alleys of Winnipeg – according to him, these streets (on which every local “in the know” travels) have their own taxi service, apart from the city’s primary fleet, as well as their own secret names, not listed on any street signs but ingrained deeply in their residents’ consciousnesses. He displays a map of these interweaved roadways and says it’s as if a secret city has been imposed upon the existing one, both existing in parallel dimensions between which one can travel on whim, as long as one knows the passwords. Perhaps – or perhaps it’s Maddin who has imposed the secret city upon the other one, the Winnipeg of his imagination upon the one that exists. In the end, the eccentric city of history and the projection of Maddin’s inner life make an extraordinary fit. Meanwhile, it turns out that the train we saw him on in the beginning is not necessarily a way out of town: some of the city’s lines actually run in a loop and passengers must keep constant vigilance, peering out their windows to ensure they aren’t returning from whence they came, in a hellish geographical incarnation of Groundhog Day.
In My Winnipeg, Maddin plays Rat and Mole and the Sea Rat, as well as a smattering of Toad and the Weasels too for good measure (Maddin relishes iconography from the city’s 1919 labor clashes, both dismissing and kind of digging the characterization of the workers as “Bolsheviks” as well as their run-ins with Catholic schoolgirls in the vicinity). He is both homebody and his own tempter away from home, but ultimately his conclusions differ from Grahame’s because the aborted voyage out of Winnipeg is not a return to the familiar safeties of home, but a renewed recognition of its challenges and its provocations, with all the rich fuel these provide for his creative fire. The film has a strong political streak, in the Tip O’Neil sense (“all politics is local”): the Winnipeg political establishment can’t be happy with how they’re portrayed here. (Among the civic government’s colossal blunders: refusing to build or expand a new rink, thus chasing their long-time professional team out of town; then tearing down a landmark department store and building in its place…a rink…that is barely beneath regulation size even if a professional team did come back to town; then finally tearing down the old, classic rink because the town apparently wasn’t big enough for the both of ’em!!!) Maddin’s ultimate inclination to stay is due in part to a protective feeling toward the city – here it is not he who runs a risk by leaving, but the city that runs a risk by him leaving it. The city, which begins as his mother, performs a role reversal by film’s end, so that now Maddin is the responsible parent, afraid to leave his wounded, threatened, “special” child-city behind. Ultimately, despite the welcome casting of Savage, the family-reenactment sequences are the least interesting in the film; the real drama is not between people but between a person and a place. The relationship is not just parental but almost marital – My Winnipeg, for better or worse, till death do us part. You may now kiss the horse-head.
Previous film: Waltz with Bashir
Next film: Gosford Park
[…] My Winnipeg (2007, Canada/USA), dir. Guy […]
No Maddin fans at Wonders? Kinda surprised…
“One of my favorite passages in the film occurs when Maddin explores the back alleys of Winnipeg – according to him, these streets (on which every local “in the know” travels) have their own taxi service, apart from the city’s primary fleet, as well as their own secret names, not listed on any street signs but ingrained deeply in their residents’ consciousnesses. He displays a map of these interweaved roadways and says it’s as if a secret city has been imposed upon the existing one, both existing in parallel dimensions between which one can travel on whim, as long as one knows the passwords.”
Well Joel, it’s too bad that WitD readers aren’t big Maddin fans, for they are missing one of the best reviews you’ve penned in your landmark series. Your points of comparison with WIND IN THE WILLOWS is highly imaginative and thoughtful, and I found myself nodding as I read. What a great idea! This is my favorite Maddin film, though I’ll admit I’m not generally much of a fan. Avante gardists are generally less appreciated in a general sense, though for me MAYA DEREN is one of the greatest of filmmakers in ANY form. The ‘memory filtered through dreams’ technique’ and the meditative aspects are profound and the use of silent cinema, and the obvious indeptedness to David Lynch and Woody Allen here are part of the equation.
Documentary it really isn’t, but Maddin as always travels his own path.
Thanks, Sam – personally I found it (my review) a bit messy but I’ll concede it had a great closing line! As for the film, I found Maddin’s style quite charming but I think I liked Brand Upon the Brain! more (though I remember losing a bit of interest in that one as it went along, here the reverse was true). It’s odd; I feel like I’ve seen more Maddin films but in perusing his filmography it looks like I’ve only seen this & Brand Upon the Brain! of his features, along with several shorts (including his amusingly un-Rosselliniesque tribute to Roberto Rossellini, which was screened before Bergman Island in NYC, as you might recall). Go figure – I guess his approach is so distinctive and evocative that once you see one, you feel like you’ve spent quite a while in his universe.
I love the avant-garde though I haven’t seen nearly enough. For me, academic interpretations and intellectual justifications are a bit beside the point – experimental films are powerful precisely because they sidestep rationality and speak directly to the unconscious. The “dream” aspect as you astutely note. Here, of course, we’re dealing with doc and elements of narrative as well as avant-garde but it makes for a heady brew.
That was such a great idea, Joel, to link Ratty`s riverbank dreams of exotica to Guy Maddin`s abortive departure from “wacky“ and “melancholy“ Winnipeg. Having been born and raised there, I watched that film with a lot more creepiness than excitement. I`d say Winnipeg`s Siberian austerity and graceless eccentrics is a tough point of departure for taking us beyond hyperbolic ridicule. There are takeoff points–somnambulant calm, lunar vistas and cold weather access to am music like The Louisiana Hayride and Gatemouth Blues from Shreveport and Wes Bowen`s Jazz Radio from Salt Lake City–but they are not really about the locals.
Maddin, as I suppose most people opting to remain there, has become obsessed with wreckage and its eerie bite.
Enclosed is a clip (Hauntings II) about one of his recent gigs, installed at the new Film Festival facility here. “Recreating“ wrecked and lost films, he hopes to lay a permanent haunting on the place.
http://torontoist.com/2010/09/guy_maddins_haunts_the_lightbox_with_his_cinematic_spooks.php
Holy crap, Jim – no idea you were a Winnipeger! Do tell more, please. Indeed you’re probably booked up already but a piece on Maddin’s film at some point would make an interesting read, particularly relating it to your own experience. I’ve never been anywhere near the city (indeed, never west of Toronto when it comes to my neighbor in the north) so I’m obviously coming from quite a different pov. At any rate, your thoughts here are greatly appreciated.
I love Maddin’s idea on that link – between the obsession with unseen Holy Grails (I did a meme on the subject a while back), the interest in a Hitchcock movie ending in Disneyland (oh how I’d love to have seen that – reading a Disney bio right now and I find that theme park endlessly fascinating), and the reference to Miss Havisham (Great Expectations being my favorite book), he proves himself a film-lover after my own heart!
As for Wind in the Willows, delving into it now for my series I’m reminded of its infinite applications. I’ve just begun researching the Edwardian period in preparation for my next post, and am also reading a hard-to-find revisionist book called The Wild Wood which takes the weasal/stoat/ferret line (I had to order it off Amazon from the UK, pretty cheap though). That’s where the weasel-as-revolutionary reference in the last passage came from I suppose. Endlessly fascinating stuff…
[…] film: The Son Next film: My Winnipeg Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Best of the 21st CenturyNo […]
[…] film: My Winnipeg Next film: The Headless […]