"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.

Traveling Light: Kelly Reichardt: New Auteurs

River of Grass

The pair meet at a bar, shortly after the guy nearly hits the girl with his car on a dark rural road. “You’re not from around here, are you?” asks the girl. “Nope,” the guy replies, “I’m from Dade.” A seemingly unremarkable exchange, until you consider that the bar these lonesome souls occupy lies somewhere in Broward County, somewhere apparently very close to the Broward/Dade County line. The exchange then becomes ironic, except that the girl and the guy don’t seem to find it all that funny. These lovers on the run in Kelly Reichardt’s debut River of Grass (1994) inhabit what many viewers would deem a decidedly small world, but to them their immediate surroundings feel just as vast and difficult to traverse as any sea or continent. This is a road movie where the protagonists can’t get past the first tollbooth, having embarked on a crime spree with very little in the way of actual crime. At one point the girl (actually a woman, probably in her early 30s) mentions how every place seems the same. This may be a subtle wink to Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), in which a similar sentiment is expressed when it’s New York-based protagonists find themselves in Florida, which just so happens to be the setting of River of Grass. (Reichardt’s vision of Florida, dingy, eccentric, a place for wanderers, seems somewhat akin to that of novelist Joy Williams). But in this context, the sentiment assumes new hues, because the person who expresses it has hardly gone anywhere.

Ode

River of Grass feels very much like a first film (albeit one by an unusually gifted maker of exceedingly personal films) in that it carries the traces of an artist trying out as many things as she can (the camera movements, the cutting, and the use of voice-over would be tempered or eschewed altogether in her future work) and still craft something with an unmistakable signature. That word, signature, calls to mind things written by hand, and things handmade. The first word expressed in Reichardt’s newest film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) isn’t spoken but rather traced upon a stone: “LOST.” There could be no better single-word summary of Reichardt’s body of work thus far, stories about people trying to get somewhere and having a tough time of it, unassuming, quiet films made with the bare minimum of participants and equipment. A record gets played in River of Grass: a rendition of ‘Traveling Light.’ A theme song perhaps. Reichardt has often spoke in interviews about her refusal/inability to “move up” to larger scale productions (something that helps explain the decade’s hiatus between her first and second features). This should not be mistaken for lack of ambition. On the contrary, one of the things that make her one of the finest, most distinctive, rigorous American filmmakers alive is her ability to cultivate so much feeling, atmosphere, narrative, character development, and even polemic out of the simplest of stories (many of them coming from collaborations with Jonathan Raymond) and humblest of materials.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s mesmerizing western about homesteaders lost in 19th century Oregon, seen largely through the eyes of women, opens today at TIFF Bell Lightbox, and I urge you to see it. The film’s Toronto premiere has also prompted a most welcome retrospective of Reichardt’s work. They’re showing everything save the short-shorts. (1999’s Ode, a mid-length work, shot on Super 8, which I’ve been waiting years to see, screens on Sunday afternoon.) River was last night, but still to come are multiple screenings of Meek’s, two screenings of Old Joy (2005), two of Wendy and Lucy (2008), and one screening of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), which was selected by Reichardt for TIFF’s Carte Blanche series. The retrospective is part of TIFF’s New Auteurs series.

Monsters: Aliens versus editors: if only the latter party could have won the battle

The story goes that Gareth Edwards pitched the idea for his monster movie set in a world where the aliens have been quarantined, got green-lit without a script, went into production with a skeleton crew, shot guerilla style, worked his largely impromptu cast into a frenzy of adlibbing, went home to cobble from a hundred hours of material and insert copious CGI, and delivered the final product for under $500,000. Good, even great movies have been born of such reckless confidence, but one shouldn’t assume Edwards’ bravado was matched by any blessed combination of talent, intelligence, or luck. Though it already has its champions, not to mention six BAFTA nominations, Monsters offers a solid case study in what happens when you don’t plan much: with way more coverage than actual inspiration or purpose, your story winds up sliding into cliché at nearly every turn. There's some fun to be had here, but it's mostly drowned out by hokeyness.

A cynical US photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) is ordered to escort his wealthy publisher’s idealistic daughter (Whitney Able) out of Mexico, an enormous chunk of which is “infected” with giant prawns from outer space—presumably the same galaxy as the quarantined aliens in District 9. So Monsters might be a border-crossing parable if it had any real ideas to it, or any real surprises. Yes, the couple meet-cute, the photographer resents his mission, but the girl speaks better Spanish, which comes in handy when they encounter all that Mexican monster bait. Getting back to America proves tricky, and they come to depend on each other, maybe even fall in love, blah, blah, blah. The plot twists itself into pretzels to keep them together, even going so far as to contrive a prostitute who steals a passport from the photographer’s hotel bedroom yet somehow doesn’t think to steal his $3,000 camera, which, by the way, you’d have to be an idiot to keep dangling around your neck all the time while traversing rural Mexico anyway.

But then Edwards’ Mexico isn’t the same one familiar to most Earthlings. Apparently the northern deserts have been replaced by jungle, and somebody moved Tepoztlán up toward the US border when nobody was looking. There are numerous such cultural and geographical oddities in Monsters, all of which could be forgiven if the movie had more energy or ingenuity, instead of dopey scenes of dumb white kids looking out on (displaced) Mayan ruins, abandoned suburbs, or alien convoys and uttering what amounts to a unanimous “Wow.” Maybe it’s true what they say about Americans not traveling enough.

Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg... Guy Maddin discusses his first docu-phantasia, psychic traps, cold facts, the true nature of truth, and Ann Savagery

Narrated by its author, laden with lyrical repetition so as to send viewers into a wintry trance, My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s new “docu-phantasia,” proposes a prairie citizenry of somnambulists afflicted with acute nostalgia, geographically isolated, perpetually snowed-in, surrounded by vestiges of history, lulled by muffled train whistles, cursed with a labyrinthine conspiracy that keeps them from ever leaving, architecturally enveloped by a geometry of symbols alluding to occult municipal histories, grotesque sporting atrocities and aboriginal mysticism.

My Winnipeg delves headlong into Maddin’s private obsessions, actually going as far as re-enacting seemingly banal moments from Maddin’s childhood with a cast of professional actors—one of whom just happens to be Ann Savage, the long-retired star of the masterful, dream-like poverty row film noir Detour (1945). Comically inspired, a frenetic flurry of far-fetched facts, imminently id-soaked, and mostly shot in beautiful, grainy-as-all-hell black and white, the modus operandi of My Winnipeg pleasingly remains very close to that of Maddin’s blatantly autobiographical—and shamelessly fantastical—Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain! (06). Like those films, it deserves to be seen as among the most finest works in his 20-year career.

Maddin spoke to us by phone from his family’s cottage in Manitoba, where children could be heard uttering bloodcurdling screams in the distance. This interview was hosted by Vue Weekly.

JB: My Winnipeg opens with a close-up of Ann Savage—the actress, we later learn, who will be portraying your mother—taking some rather stern line-readings from you, while you remain off-screen. This choice of starting point has really stuck with me, because in a sense it seems to tell us right off the bat that what we’re witnessing is a sort of incantation on the part of the author, a history willed, even dictated into being.

Guy Maddin: That’s a nice way of putting it. It wasn’t in the script, but it seemed the simplest way of portraying what kind of thoughtless, self-centered lengths I as the documentarian was willing to go to. Even if you had to figure it out backwards, it was my way of saying, Hey, I’m just bullying my way into your field of vision to show you a mythology I’ll do anything to make. The idea of starting out by forcing a woman against her will to say a line a certain way struck me as potentially confusing, but apt.

JB: How concerned were you with getting things right with regards to the Winnipeg history, the Winnipeg culture, the Winnipeg persona?

GM: I just felt that, having been commissioned to make a highly personal portrait of my hometown, if I was honest with myself I wouldn’t have to research anything other than my feelings. Canadians are such lousy self-mythologizers: the preferred medium for mythologizing for the last century has been motion pictures, yet Winnipeg has never really attempted to exploit that, so I had a lot of catching up to do. I had to get the greatest hits all into one movie. I’m always asked how much of My Winnipeg is true. People expect me to say none of it, but the truth to closer to all of it. I did make some factual errors, unintentionally. For example, Winnipeg isn’t actually the coldest city in the world—Ulan Bator, Mongolia is colder. I remember reading that Winnipeg was the coldest when I was a kid. Maybe they have more accurate stats now. Maybe global warming has shifting the standings. Anyway the factual part of My Winnipeg is mostly oral history stuff. I like to break the film down as one-third fact, one-third legend—which is usually truer than fact—and than just one-third wishful thinking, laments and complaints.

JB: To use Werner Herzog’s very useful terminology, I think My Winnipeg trades in “ecstatic truth” rather than “the accountant’s truth.”

GM: When I first heard Herzog use that term, I was thrilled. But I think what I’m after is maybe almost more of the hysterical truth.

JB: For me at least, My Winnipeg feels part of a trilogy with Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! They circle around the same carrion. They all share this particularly urgent delirium. And building on the strengths of its predecessors, My Winnipeg turns out to be one of your most fluid films. It sort of just clips by.

GM: Well Brand Upon the Brain! had a live element, the live narration and live foley and so on. And I think I became more of a showman than a filmmaker then. Filmmakers tend to make things only for themselves, but once we added that live element, I wanted to make sure that people in the theatre were engaged. I really learned the rewards of making that connection, so I always had the audience in mind while making My Winnipeg, from start to finish.

JB: How have Winnipeggers responded to the film? Were you at all apprehensive?

GM: I really didn’t know what to expect. I thought they might just go berserk with anger, because whenever I showed the movie in other cities—Berlin, Sydney, didn’t matter where—there was always some irascible Winnipegger who’d stand up and complain that I left out the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football club, or the Taste of Manitoba food fair, something like that. All the Winnipeggers I ran into were really unwelcome sights, so I thought, Holy smokes, 1600 Winnipeggers crammed into our old vaudeville palace could really turn into a dangerous mob. But they ended up being a really generous, warm crowd. They seemed delighted by these jokes that seemed wedged in there just for them. They even gave my mom a standing ovation.

JB: How much do you consider your development as a filmmaker to be inextricably linked to your essential confinement to Winnipeg?

GM: I don’t think I would have made the same work elsewhere. I remember when I first started out I was determined not to have any association with Winnipeg and went out of my way not mention it. But I eventually found that the more I addressed directly the place where I dwelled I’d feel more connected with the work.

JB: I realize of course that you do escape Winnipeg on a regular basis, but at this point, would you say that it’ll likely remain your permanent residence for the rest of your life?

GM: [Sighs] Yeah, probably. [Sighs again] Might as well just buy the burial plot now. It’s true that whenever I’m in another city I’m happy there for a month, but then I start missing home. And then as soon as I go home it’s… disappointing somehow. I don’t know…

JB: I’m not trying to depress you here.

GM: [Laughs] It’s okay… Really.

JB: But, cementing its connection to Detour, I got this sense in My Winnipeg that you’re like Tom Neal, and Winnipeg itself is your femme fatale, that you’re doomed to return again and again to her, like she’s this maternal siren.

GM: That’s very true. I’ve never thought of it that way, but maybe you’ve put your finger on it. She’s my Barbara Stanwyck and I’m her Walter Neff. We have kind of a mad love relationship, where if Winnipeg looks at me the wrong way I’ll slap it across the face, and then lose myself in its curves… Gee, I really like that.

Guy down in front next to the lady, he's our man in Panama: a comic chronicle of heartache, humiliation and pathology in Key West, circa 1978

I have never been to Key West, Florida. At least not, you know, in the conventional sense. But I have written about it, several times in fact, and what’s more I even wrote about Key West for the people of Key West. My pal Paul moved down there and got me a gig with a local magazine, interviewing Key Westers or, in any case, people somehow associated with the place, however incredibly tangentially. I’d talk to them and then write about our conversation in such a way that made it seem like I personally had something profound to say about Key West, even pretending it was a place I could in some way call home. The ruse was encouraged by my superiors. It was weirdly fun.

Most of what I do know about Key West I learned the same highly dubious way I learn most things: from reading fiction. Key West’s literary history is of course formidable, with its Hemingways and Tennessees and Elizabeth Bishops, though the period that really got me interested occured after their time, a period that previous to this gig I knew absolutely zilch about. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about Key West seemed to talk about what the place was like in the 70s, the time before colossal gentrification, the time of locally sanctioned madness, cheap real estate, too many guns, too many drugs, rampant corruption and literary outlaws. And I don’t know that any one figure seemed to sum up that time better than Thomas McGuane, a.k.a. Captain Berserko. Dude was so crazy he even married Margot Kidder. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t live there anymore.

The McGuane novel that everyone considers to be the his defining Key West work is Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), which he himself eventually made into an amiably off the wall movie with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton and Kidder (enough said). But the one that strikes me as the genuine article, the one that comes closest to mapping out the particular pathology of that era/place/generation is in fact the novel McGuane took his biggest critical whipping for, largely on account of its disquieting degree of autobiographical content delivered in the treacherous wake of McGuane’s time spent courting Hollywood and seducing starlets. Literary types tend to find it distasteful when ostensibly serious writers overstep the boundaries of literary celebrity, and Panama (78), dragged McGuane’s private hysteria and public fumbles out into the open. You ask me, it’s a hell of a book, that much better—not to mention funnier—than its predecessor for laying its heart so crudely bare—though like Ninety-two, the mercurial comic prose is in high gear.

Panama’s protagonist is one Chester Pomeroy, returning to Key West to lick his wounds following some sort of debacle, or a perhaps series of them. The back cover blub explains that Chester’s a washed-up rock star, though you’d never glean that from anything described in the meat of the novel. He mentions being on tour, seems to like music, and at one point recalls having lunch with Jean-Luc Godard, but the way he conveys his past vocational adventures tends to be willfully oblique and/or surreally embellished: “I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.”

Chester’s two central concerns upon his return, the poles of some Oedipal wish-fulfillment, are: a reunion with Catherine, a woman he apparently married years ago in Panama, though neither can remember the ceremony, a woman he publicly insulted at some point in his blurry past but whom he still loves with an aching force, so much so that he stalks her in super markets and actually nails his left hand to her door while super-loaded on Bolivian cocaine; and to continue denying that his father is still alive, wealthy and boring, rather than a store detective who died of smoke inhalation in a Boston subway fire years ago. This is just one example of our hero’s selective or severely damaged recall skills. Chester’s memory issues are offered some degree of remedy when Catherine hires a private detective to follow him around so as to report back later on his actions. Yet in Chester’s first-person narration there’s never anything less than a rich sense of someone less than obsessed with coming to terms with his own identity. In an especially memorable moment, that sense of self-actualization is specifically concerned with how his relationship to place: “I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death.”

In a certain sense Panama is a novel of redemption, though the shape or value of this redemption is hardly clearly defined or entirely resolved. It is a sort of staggering celebration of self-implosion and fiery bullshit, and a treatise on the limitations of willing oneself toward insanity. And it’s thick with a palpable, desperate heartache that refuses to surrender to the notion of a polite, quiet laying down of arms in romantic battle. What’s important too is that it speaks so specifically of a geography and a people as an entry point into persona and story. Whether or not the Key West of Panama really existed matters less than the fact that only Key West, that crazed, slightly suicidal Key West of the 70s, could have helped give birth to this heartfelt, daring, extraordinary goof of a novel.