(Canada, 96 min.)
Written and directed by Bill Taylor
Starring: Tommie-Amber Pirie, Ben Lewis,
Rosemary Dunsmore, Gianpaolo Venuta, Oliver Dennis
I’m sorry that Alaska
is a film that I lost amidst the November-December screener flood. It’s a lovely and
remarkably subtle family drama from up-and-coming filmmaker Bill Taylor (The Young Prime Minister). The film
jumps into the life of twenty-seven-year-old wanderer Liney (Tommie Amber
Pirie, The Birder) as she visits three family members to repair
broken ties and scrounge for money so that she and her boyfriend, Dan (Ben
Lewis), may schlep up to Alaska and earn a living working the fishing boats during
the frigid northern winter. Canucks went down the road in films of the 70s, but Liney's goin' up the road to better her prospects.
Don’t Get Killed in
Alaska is disarming with its simplicity. It’s essentially three
conversations played in succession with restrained interludes of Liney
travelling through the GTA on a Coach Canada bus. A visit with her mother (a
heartbreaking Rosemary Dunsmore) in her lonely wood-panelled home introduces a
woman defined by regrets. The second trip moves Liney into the thick of
Toronto, distinctly shot as a busy concrete jungle of girders and glass, as she
visits her uptight brother (Gianpaolo Venuta), a lawyer and foodie, whose
ambition and drive are polar opposites of her own. The third and final sequence
brings Liney out to cow country as she visits her modest father (Oliver Dennis)
and revisits her roots on the family farm, which has a beautifully rosy slice-of-life atmosphere. Taylor and DP Ben Lichty strikingly capture
each local as a character of its own, and each of three acts markedly sets
Liney within three disparate psychologies as the habitats in which her
relations find themselves as effective markers of their personalities and values.
Taylor also finds nice metaphors in the beverages offered to
Liney during the visits, as she goes from sharing screw-top rosé with her
mother to red wine in poncey glasses with her brother to good-old Canadian
brews with her dad. The methods and invitations to serve also highlight the philosophies
that each family member has to share: “Get your own beer” might be the most efficient
parenting advice a dad has to offer after a hard day’s work on the farm. Don’t Get Killed in Alaska efficiently
interconnects people and places to show the tensions that brought Liney to her
current dilemma and pull her in various directions as she struggles to
reconcile her family’s unhappiness with her own.
The three acts build a family broken and divided by
bitterness. The first act might be the strongest as the lonely old mother
knocks back glass upon glass of rosé and tries to make amends with her. Dunsmore
is most up to the task amongst Liney’s onscreen relations for carrying the understated
gravitas of the divisions and rootlessness dividing and defining families
today.
Taylor situates Liney’s personal struggle within the greater
battle of the Occupy Movement as news of the Movement’s momentum creeps in over
the radio as Liney and Dan drive away from the Maritimes and escape their
troubles. Don’t Get Killed in Alaska
speaks of personal and collective solutions to the struggle, aligning Liney’s
story within their shared action of the Occupiers, but it ultimately suggests
that collective catharsis comes with each person finding himself or herself
and, in turn, working to repair the smaller units that form the greater
collective.
The motif of the journey along the road also locates Don’t Get Killed in Alaska within the
greater psyche of Canadian cinema and literature that suggests that life will
be better elsewhere. As Liney runs from New Brunswick to Toronto (much like
Hank and Joe went down the road decades ago), she finds that no easy answers
for life lie within either the booming Canadian metropolis or its outlying
areas. Just where life’s answers are to be found is a mystery, and Taylor’s
delicately understated screenplay leaves Liney’s backstory ambiguous and her
future open-ended. A strong performance by Pirie anchors Don’t Get Killed in Alaska every step of the way. Her quietly careworn
Liney shows the strain and exhaustion that speaks to the experiences of young
adults of today as they build a future by hopping from place to place and
living hand to mouth, and the subtle resilience and grit of her character holds
an unwavering light for the future. This poignant film finds power in its understated simplicty.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Don’t Get Killed in Alaska is now available on home video.
