STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY is a film directed by Cynthia Scott and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It stars seven non-professional actors, Alice Diabo, Mary Meigs, Constance Garneau, Michelle Sweeney, Beth Webber, and two others whose names have gotten away from me. The screenplay was written by Gloria Demers with Cynthia Scott, David Wilson, and Sally Bochner.
In some ways, this yank thinks STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY is the perfect Canadian film. It is quiet, sensitive, non-violent, non-spectacular, the very opposite of the Hollywood flick; it is informed by a love of its characters and the scenery (Mont Tremblant), by intelligence, by the idea spoken by one the characters that everyone has an interesting story.
This story concerns six older women whose tour bus breaks down 20 miles from help. They and their driver (Sweeney), a young, black woman who has twisted her ankle, painfully make their way to a deserted farmhouse above an idyllic lake. They need shelter, beds, food, and hope of rescue. They set about surviving with an unhurried practicality and openness. Some of their efforts are silly, some crafty. They do what they can and they complain or blame hardly at all. They spend a lot of their time talking and revealing their interesting stories. No potboilers, no confrontations, no great break throughs, just people depending on one another.
The dramatis personae include a nun with an interest in automechanics, an elegant lesbian who paints watercolors and who has a fund of facts about nature (Meigs), an ex-Liverpudlian with a face like an owl and a unique approach to aerobics, a woman with a high-pitched voice and the cheeriness of an idiot or a saint, a Mohawk matriarch (Diabo) who knows some tricks about wild food and survival, a beautiful and young looking 80-year-old (Webber) with a fear of wattles, the driver with a talent for making music and friends, and a 92-year-old (Garneau) who thinks she may have found a good place to die.
These women largely play themselves, it is their stories that they tell so effectively. The director from time to time shows old snapshots from life of character or another; you see the story in their changing faces.
My audience had a preponderance of older people in it, exactly the opposite of most movie audiences. This may have been a reflection of the matinee ticket prices (which are lower than seniors prices). Certainly the mob waiting for the next show were more demographically normal. The younger couple behind me thought that every action and utterance on the screen was so cute as to require a laugh. It's true, sometimes the women were unspeakably cute, but at other times they broke our hearts, they moved us to tears, they filled us with awe at their bravery, their grace, their acceptance of life. They had their fears (death, not seeing a great-grandchild grow up, being ugly, not dying even); after all, they were human beings--and we are all afraid, but are we all as wise about our fears and foolishness?
If I have any complaints about STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY, it is that the cast is too perfectly balanced. Could such a group really find themselves on one small tour bus--the nun, the dyke, the Indian, the Afro-Canadian, the English immigrant, et aliae? This is the only artifice in a movie that emphasizes naturalness, the only fiction in a movie that is really about real people.
Please see this movie. It will change you. Pay whatever they ask to get in. If it doesn't play where you see import movies, as the manager to schedule it. And then send a letter of thanks to the National Film Board of Canada.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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