"When you strip away enough manmade elements, places take on this grandiosity...": Ryan Redford on Oliver Sherman

Sherman Oliver (Garret Dillahunt) was shot in the head in an unnamed war. He survived, yet sustained a severe brain injury. During the months he was hospitalized he thought his name was Oliver Sherman because he couldn’t understand that his paperwork addressed him last name first. Everything in his life seems backward now. The first we see of him in Oliver Sherman isn’t his face but the back of his head, the hair close-cropped so his scar remains visible. Sherman tracks down Franklin (Donal Logue), the solider who saved his life, at his rural home. In the seven years since they last saw each other Franklin got a job, married Irene (Molly Parker), and had kids. Sherman became a drifter and an alcoholic. He’s polite and unassuming, but it’s unclear how long he’s planning to stay with Franklin and his family, or what he plans to do besides taking Franklin out drinking every night. Based on Rachel Ingalls’ short story ‘Veterans,’ Oliver Sherman chronicles a troubled friendship between two vets. They weren’t really friends when they served together, but now seem inextricably bound by a shared trauma.

Oliver Sherman is the feature debut of writer/director Ryan Redford and is remarkably assured. Neither a word nor an image is wasted. Every scene accumulates in quiet portent, buoyed by immaculate performances from the three leads and the dusky photography of In the Bedroom’s Antonio Calvache. The story recalls Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner, though Oliver Sherman also reminded me of Frankenstein: it concerns a sort of monster, stitched together yet somehow incomplete, who never asked for his life and now roams the earth, fundamentally apart from the civilized world, resembling other men yet never quite succeeding at assimilating their ways. (The only significant flaw in Oliver Sherman is that several characters’ don’t seem to catch on to the rather obvious fact that Sherman is severely mentally impaired.) This is one of the strongest Canadian films of recent years and deserves far more attention than it’s received since its premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. It’s now available on DVD from Mongrel Media.

writer/director Ryan Redford

Redford first heard of Ingalls’ Times Like These, the collection that featured ‘Veterans,’ when it was published in 2005, but it wasn’t until after he’d spent four years developing what he thought would be his first feature, “a strange, violent western” that proved too ambitious and costly, that he came across the book and devoured ‘Veterans’ in one sitting. It wasn’t obviously cinematic, but possessed a “timeless, mythic element” that was right up Redford’s alley. “‘Veterans’ addressed these big life and death themes,” Redford explains, “the validity of violence, how one goes about becoming a proper citizen, and how difficult that can be.”

I spoke with Redford last February.

JB: I’m uncertain where this originates from culturally, but watching Oliver Sherman I kept thinking about this old notion that when you save someone’s life you assume responsibility for it.

Ryan Redford: I think it’s Japanese.

JB: This seems to be at the heart of Franklin’s dilemma, his wondering if saving Sherman was a good deed or a kind of curse.

RR: That and the feeling that under slightly different circumstances he might have wound up like Sherman. For all Franklin knew Sherman might have died after they last saw each other, so when he shows up seven years later there’s this shock and horror that Franklin was the cause of this man’s fractured existence.


JB: Place plays an interesting role in Oliver Sherman. Do you come from a rural community?

RR: Not really. My family moved us from Vancouver to Aurora, Ontario when I was 16. I lived there for five or six years and in that time Aurora went from being fairly rural to increasingly developed, with Starbucks, Blockbusters, and strip malls. But I’d always found myself drawn to Andrew Wyeth paintings. I like that poetic something that untouched environments have. When you strip away enough manmade elements, places take on this grandiosity that’s always appealed to me.

JB: Are there rural films that serve as touchstones for you?

RR: I’m not comparing this movie to anything of his in any way, but an obvious source of inspiration is Terrence Malick’s films. Malick has this very formal approach, very grounded in nature…

JB: And very philosophical.

RR: Yeah, there’s something mythic to his movies. I also had the crew watch Andrei Zvyaginstev’s The Return, just to get them in the right frame of mind.

JB: Oliver Sherman doesn’t concern itself with connective geography. We’re either at this very vulnerable looking house surrounded by fields and woods, a small, cramped public library, or this womb-like bar with no women, but there’s no sense of how these places fit together geographically.

RR: I hate establishing shots. I like big landscapes. I like pretty pictures. I hate starting in wide and then getting closer and closer. There’s something pleasingly disorienting about starting a scene and not knowing where you are. Only at the end of a scene will I maybe cut to a wide to finish it and underscore the isolation.


JB: The lack of orientation gave the film this vaguely dreamlike quality that seems to mirror Sherman’s experience of the world, given his cognitive deficiencies.

RR: I’m not always so wild about reflecting what’s going on with the character in the compositions, but I realize there are many shots where I’m making Sherman tiny and solitary within the frame. So I guess sometimes I was doing that on purpose. So much of the storytelling has to do with withholding, so maybe that’s part of it too.


JB: Can you say something about your decision to withhold a key act of violence?

RR: I don’t think we see any acts of violence in the film, but they’re alluded to. Some would argue that showing that scene you’re referring to might have provided more of a punch in the gut, but I always thought it would be too over the top in this kind of restrained, quiet movie.

JB: I think there are ways you could have pulled it off, but it would have supplied a catharsis inappropriate for that point in the story. It’s also nice that we only later discover what exactly happened after the fade to black.

RR: I think you’re right.

JB: There’s a photograph in Franklin’s house of a horse’s eye that seems to be keeping watch over he action. It caught my eye because by isolating the eye the horse seems so spooked, and because Sherman’s relationship with animals, whether its the barking dog he spits on or his story about how to kill a fox, seems antagonistic and important to the story.

RR: That was the production designer. I was initially resistant to it. I don’t like having art on walls in my movies. I don’t like referencing other artists. I don’t like art that’s supposed to be metaphorical. I concede that it is a pretty unsettling image, but I can’t take credit for it.


JB: What about the music box playing that Beethoven piano sonata?

RR: I was just searching for something with the right rhythm, given how we’d cut it. I’d seen The Man Who Wasn’t There recently…

JB: I was going to ask you about that. Once you’ve seen that movie it’s hard to forget that tune.

RR: Yeah, and it just happened to be on this sound effects collection. I’d hated everything I’d heard until that point, and then I saw that movie on TV at 1.00 in the morning, tried it out, and it worked. We were actually going to replace it forever but never got around to it.

JB: The film has such a distinct sensibility. Were there certain elements that you wanted in your first feature regardless of what the story or genre was going to be?

RR: My friends make fun of me for it, but every one of my shorts—and I made plenty of them—had this timeless element and these rural settings, a sort of displaced or lyrical version of reality. So I’m sure that when I was reading stories and looking for adaptable material that I had that aesthetic I’d developed in the back of my mind. Having said that, I think it might be time to branch out a little. Oliver Sherman was the period at the end of that sentence, so to speak.

My dearest fiend: on finally reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Richard Rothwell's portrait of Mary Shelley

There’s that moment which occurs near the halfway point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor Frankenstein is finally reunited with the monster. Frankenstein has entered university, dazzled his mentors and, in secret, created his artificial man through some unholy marriage of archaic magic and scientific method. He’s fallen ill following the completion of his creation, like a mother weakened by the physical torments of birth. He’s utterly neglected to determine the monster’s whereabouts, and has gradually discovered its capacity for murder. He’s wracked with guilt over having breathed life into the monster’s piecemeal flesh, yet, foreshadowing all that follows, assumes no responsibility for the crimes the monster commits, crimes which Frankenstein, one of the worst parents in Western literature, could arguably have prevented.

The monster’s return is illuminated by a flash of lightning—the same phenomenon at which the 15-year-old Frankenstein marveled so fatefully. It approaches and, to the great shock of those familiar with Boris Karloff’s famously inarticulate manifestation, it begins to speak. “Do your duty towards me,” the monster beseeches his maker, “and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you in peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends… Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed… I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

The monster asks Frankenstein to hear his story, and so begins this landmark novel’s most astonishing and moving section, the testament of this eight-foot wretch, who begins his biography by trying to describe the memory of coming into this world fully formed, cognizant and sensitive to basic needs, yet mystified by every new occurrence, and from the start orphaned. He takes to the wilderness, eventually learns to observe and imitate humans, is stirred by music, beauty, and familial love, comprehends the importance of interdependence and the inevitability of disappointment in others, and even educates himself into literacy with the help of volumes of Milton and Goethe. By the time the monster is able to converse with Frankenstein he’s become as eloquent as any character in the novel. This might seem unlikely, even more unlikely than the fact of the monster’s creation, given what we now appear capable of producing nearly 200 years later. But eloquence of any sort can seem unlikely when weighed against the savagery that mankind continues to prove capable of. This novel itself seems unlikely, a succinct, surprising, and imminently durable masterpiece, whose ostensible flaws obey the logic of dream on which the whole is founded, whose epistolary structure of stories within stories within stories reads as so completely modern, and whose magnificence was brought into the world by someone all of 18 years of age.

The draft of Frankenstein

I’m a lot older than 18 and have only now finally gotten round to reading Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in a handsome hardbound edition (Everyman’s Library, $21), so you’ll have to forgive my rapture. Obviously, I was perfectly aware of Frankenstein’s immeasurable influence, but I somehow failed to anticipate just how fascinating and strange its structure is, how evocative and often poetic its language, and how rich and diverse its themes or motifs, which constitute the region in which Shelley conveyed her highest level of sophistication.

Walton, the Englishman who is ultimately the novel’s only (perhaps unreliable) narrator, seeks adventure and glory in the Arctic, and his letters to his sister speak repeatedly about the preciousness and rarity of friendship—a concern mirrored exactly in the confessions of Victor Frankenstein, whom he encounters during his arduous travels and whose tale he records. Walton longs for the companionship of his sister, and this longing too is mirrored, with more explicit creepiness, in Frankenstein’s story, which iterates again and again Frankenstein’s abiding love for his adoptive sister, to whom he’s inescapably betrothed. And in the story of the monster too these same themes dominate: loneliness, and the desire for a lady companion born of the same fault-laden parentage. (I had no idea that right here in Shelley’s Frankenstein lie the seeds for Hollywood’s Bride of Frankenstein.)

The Bride of Frankenstein

So Frankenstein is a story of absent mothers, ineffectual fathers, men without women. But where this gets really interesting is in Frankenstein’s own participation in his undoing. The monster is the product of Frankenstein’s own hubris, yet it could also be interpreted as a whopper of an excuse for Frankenstein’s perpetuating a fearful avoidance of consummation. If Frankenstein fails to fulfill the not entirely unreasonable requests of the monster—to my eyes the novel’s most sympathetic character—to produce for him a female counterpart, the monster promises to return to ruin Frankenstein’s life precisely on the night of his wedding. What better way to prolong bachelorhood! Frankenstein’s anxiety surrounding marriage is subverted by an act of masculine immaculate conception and the brutal and terrifying incidents that accumulate as a result. There are multiple morals to be gained from Shelley’s tale, and I wonder if among them is something about the immense power of sheer procrastination, which in the hands of the wrong genius can itself prove monstrous.

What the Dead Know

Imagine you’re unjustly locked up for second-degree murder. You were just protecting your wife. You don’t know your own strength. It was a freak thing. You’re a musician, an aesthete, soft-spoken, demure by nature, a gentle soul with a shuffling walk and the slight lunge of those ready to topple into the grave. You get out of the pen, you’re womanless, hard-up, turned away from some big shot you were promised would give you a little work. You walk the streets in a beat-up hat and too-short baggy trousers when you meet this guy, friendly as can be. He recognizes you from the papers, remembers your case, knows you got a raw deal. He buys you a coffee, says he’s a PI, offers some work, kid stuff, just watch a house for a while, track the gentleman’s movements. The catch is the gentleman in question is the very judge that sent you up. Seems a little queer, but you can’t be picky. You’re too trusting, or fatalistic, to know when you’re being set up.


That’s the lowdown for John Ellman, the hero of The Walking Dead (1936), and if I’m trying to put you in his raggedy shoes it’s only because he’s embodied by Boris Karloff with such texture and compassion that you can’t help but sympathize—even if you never get the full story about that earlier killing. Ellman takes the fall for a mafia hit and gets the chair—a novelty of the period and much in the press. But somewhere a pair of young lovers who witnessed the crime lose sleep over the fact that they never came to Ellman’s defense. They finally confess, but it’s too late. The news gets to the prison just as Ellman gets the juice. But wait, the lovers are scientists, working for a visionary experimenting with reviving the dead. So Ellman corpse is sent directly to the lab, hooked up to electrodes, and Karloff’s given a major dose of déjà vu, five years after Frankenstein (31). He’s alive, again, remote, as though swallowed by completely by the melancholy that hounded him in his previous life. He doesn’t talk much, so the question lingers: what does he remember of death?

Directed by Michael Curtiz, still far from Casablanca (42) but in excellent form in a flurry of prestige Bs, The Walking Dead is a haunting picture. It’s riddled with artifice and coincidence as our Lazarus begins to quietly enact his wrath, yet it’s endowed with spectral beauty and a deep emotional current thanks mainly to Karloff, as well as an inspired feeling for musical accompaniment—Ellman’s final request is to have a cello player score his death march—and a spare lighting and production design that looks back to German Expressionism and forward to noir. The story also looks forward to The Dead Zone (83), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the loneliness that grips those back from the void and carrying secret knowledge.

The Walking Dead is by far the best thing in Warner’s Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box, though Zombies on Broadway (45) is also very worthwhile. A horror-comedy that’s mostly comedy, it finds Wally Brown and Alan Carney’s New York talent agents coerced by a showbiz mobster into going down to a Caribbean isle to fetch a genuine zombie. Lured by a leggy American showgirl, they eventually find Bela Lugosi secretly cooking up a zombie formula. He fools them into digging their own graves and spending the night in his castle and, you know, hilarity ensues. It’s actually a fairly entertaining bit of hysterical hokum if you can stomach the crude racial gags, but more importantly for classic horror fans it represents a very weird effort to capitalize on a previous hit. Just like Lugosi’s zombies, my eyes popped out of my head when I recognized not only Sir Lancelot, once again playing a calypso singer serenading newcomers with sweetly forbidding ballads, but also Darby Jones, once again playing a shirtless giant zombie. Both were pivotal to the unforgettable spell of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (42), the second film to emerge from producer Val Lewton’s legendary low-budget horror unit at RKO. Their reprisals here are far less distinguished, though at least Jones gets his comeuppance this time around.

Frankenstein 1970 (58) features Karloff as the original mad scientist’s great-great grumpy grandson. In need of funds to buy an atomic reactor so he can make more monsters, he allows a Hollywood film crew to use his castle. The industry satire is all stale cliché, the story is limpid and limited, the monster’s head in wrapped up in so many bandages he looks like Gumby post-surgery. It’s genuinely curious that director Howard Koch chooses to cover most of the scenes in long, unbroken takes and wide shots, though they only make things drag even more. Though it’s got Lugosi, Karloff and Peter Lorre on board, You’ll Find Out (40) seems mainly a showcase for radio personality Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge. It’s not much of a horror movie, though it did seem really horrible. I had to shut off the TV and run screaming.

Hymns to the silence: embracing the mysteries of Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive

Set in a Castilian village in the years immediately following Franco’s victory and the end of the Spanish Civil War, Víctor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973) evokes a landscape, flat and vast, creaking and autumnal, in which inhabitants appear to have been driven into hibernation. But in this protracted, quasi-fairy tale sleep begins a richer depth of dreaming. Like Ana (Ana Torrent), the remarkable, dark-eyed, five-year-old girl at the film’s centre, we’re able to explore this landscape, while the political tumult that has scarred it is never mentioned directly. Rather than being merely oblique, Erice shaped his debut film so as to be attuned to Ana’s way of seeing, while the impressions left in the wake of recent events—events that exhaust Ana’s limited understanding of the world—still exist to be read peripherally by the rest of us.

While phasing in and out of Ana’s perception, using both time-lapse dissolves and the overlapping of discordant sounds, both thoughts and images to unify the various elements into a general spectral atmosphere, Erice exhibits a singular sensitivity to subjective experience, emphatically placing value on individual interpretation without being precious about it, or even feeling shackled to any one individual. Potent symbols abound, but their significance is unannounced, or perhaps it is just that it always remains out of reach, except for rare moments such the one in which Ana is asked to place eyes on a two-dimensional figure in front of her class at school: here is an unmistakable  lesson in seeing. By this point in Spirit of the Beehive, Ana and her older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) have shared the experience that, over a short period, will radically alter Ana’s relationship to what is seen and not seen.

A truck arrives in their town. It carries in it a dubbed version of James Whale's Frankenstein, which is projected in a makeshift screening room. Films are surely rare spectacles in these parts. And Ana, overwhelmed by the story of the monster and the girl he inadvertently kills, leaves the screening with important questions she can’t answer alone. Before they sleep that same night, Isabel tries to explain the film to her sister in a way that blurs her own ideas of reality and fiction. She tells Ana that the monster is not really dead because movies are fake; however, the monster himself is real and, if he knows you, you can call out to him at night and he will visit. Rather than demystifying the film, Isabel’s complex reading makes the mystery of the artificial man more real for Ana, and soon Ana’s own tactile experience, particularly the things she witnesses at an abandoned farm near the train tracks, will confirm her sister’s testimony.

Adults move through Ana’s world either mutely or speaking in riddles. They have withdrawn from the world to preoccupy themselves with, in the case of Ana’s father Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), beekeeping and nocturnal writing, copying out passages from Maurice Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee; or in that of her mother, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) writing to an unidentified other who she knows may never actually receive her letters. Ana’s mother’s writing could perhaps be interpreted as a model for Ana’s own private missives: both enact a kind of prayer, sending out messages in spite of the hopeless ambiguity surrounding delivery.

Spirit of the Beehive is a strangely textured, hauntingly beautiful and seductively slippery film of seemingly always fading autumnal light, mirrored images and enveloping enigma. Not unlike The Curse of the Cat People, its insight into child psychology through the examination of traumas that adult eyes never fall upon bridges the magical thinking of early childhood and the melancholy observation of movies that look to the past for knowledge of the present. It’s somehow a fairy tale, a tone poem and a political allegory all at once. In short, its unforgettable, and not to be missed by anyone with a tolerance, much less a desire, for the sublime that lays in the shadows of the inexplicable.