By Anne Brodie
Michael Greyeyes, Carmen Moore, Alex Rice and Michelle Thrush lead a small cast in Meadowlarks from Tasha Hubbard. They’re Cree siblings – Anthony, Connie, Marianne and Gwen, taken from their sharedmother during the infamous Sixties Scoop. The Canadian government took by force native children from their home and families to send them to residential schools. There, they would be taught to be white Christians. The horrific practice under four Prime Ministers – John Diefenbaker, Lester B. Pearson, Louis St. Laurent and Pierre Elliott Trudeau – traumatised generations of indigenous Canadians. Meadowlarks begins with three sisters and a brother together, now in their fifties,meeting for the first time in a remote getaway home in Banff. One was adoptedand grew up in Belgium, another was bounced from foster home to foster home, one turned to drugs, you get the picture. It’s a kind of chamber piece as each reveals what it meant and means to have been kidnapped and sent away and changed. They were powerless, “less than” and because all but one never saw their parents again, heartbroken. Gorgeous,resonant performances strengthen the realities of grieving, growth, acceptance and starting anew. Meadowlarks addresses an issue we should know more about, and there is a lot to learn here, within an intimate cinematic experience. In theatres Nov. 28 in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, Hamilton, Sudbury, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria.
Train Dreams, from Clint Bentley, a worthy descendant of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, is a rich, profoundly moving story of a logger and his family struggling to survive at the turn of the last century. Joel Edgerton is magnificent as the weary, philosophical head of the family, Robert Grainier, his supportive wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their newborn girl. Robert lost his parents as a baby and has no memory of them and strives to create the family he never had. They live rough and isolated in the Pacific Northwest wilderness, in a crude cabin wind whistles through, growing potatoes and held together by an unbreakable bond. Gladys supports him as he leaves her alone with the baby for months on end as he chops down magnificent “500-year-old trees” and prepares them for market and clear space for a railroad. His unforgettable coworkers hail from all over the world, hard headed (literally) and fraternal, each dedicated to this back breaking line of work, towards a better life. Robert is something of a mystic, a dreamer and lover of nature. He looks deeply at the natural world and marvels; it brings tears to his eyes. Despite hardship life is good. Things begin to crack when a bounty hunter comes by and shoots dead one of the loggers; a massive forest fire scatters the men. Intense damage as far as the eye can see, as he runs home to find his family. He finds ash but refuses to count them out. This pastoral, spiritual and utterly human work of art will sit with you a long time. Based on the novella by Denis Johnson. Now on Netflix.
Just caught up with this gem. New Yorker Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel series Maus launched a revolution the art of cartooning. Previously cartoons were published strictly for laughs, nothing serious, kid stuff. Spiegelman loved drawing and creating his own cartoons as a child, growing up with parents who survived the Holocaust. He knew their stories of abuse, torture and the annihilation of Jews under Hitler’s crazed and doomed Reich. He was told details of the death camps that became seared into his memory. In the 60’s Spiegelman became a successful commercial cartoonist, created graphic novels and founded a number of underground magazines, which in the 60s were satirical forms of protest against traditional American values and the current war in Vietnam. The he took cartooning in an all-new dimension, recreating his parents’ memories in the camps, the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats in Maus 1 and Maus 2 and later in MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic. A trip to Auschwitz gave him the final form; seeing it with his own eyes. No laughs. The straight, engrossing goods on that vile chapter in German history that erased six million Jews, one in three across Europe during WWII – 1933-45. The tone is straightforward, unsparing and real and he won a Pulitzer Prize. Directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s doc Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse features interviews with his wife, Françoise Mouly, graphic novelist R. Crumb, Molly Crabapple, Joe Sacco, Bill Griffith, Nadja, and his son Dash Spiegelman. His graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers his meditation on the events of 9/11. He’s 77 and still at it!
Available on:
+3Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse on PBS platforms like the free PBS App, pbs.org, or the American Masters YouTube channel. It is also available for streaming on Apple TV and MUBI.