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| Ennis Esmer (centre) stars in Big News from Grand Rock with Tammy Isbell, Peter Keleghan, Gordon Pinsent, and Kristin Booth. |
Grand Rock hits theatres after touring smaller towns with the Toronto International Film Festival’s Film Circuit, and audiences have been embracing the final product just as warmly as the town of Midland, Ontario did during the shoot. The director and star note that it’s been lots of fun sharing Grand Rock with audiences who appreciate the way the film captures the pace and rhythm of small town life. “The other funny that’s been happening,” Perlmutter adds, “is that journalists and reporters... have been coming up and saying how much they appreciate the fact that we’re telling this story, although they always point out that there’s no way that a small town newspaper could afford that many reporters.”
“Oh, really? Four is
too many?” I ask, guestimating the number of reporters who fill the pages of
The Equity. (Three-ish is their total, just one shy of the team is Grand Rock, although a few residents of
local townships send in weekly columns listing who died, visited, or won at bridge.)
Anyone who enjoys the nostalgia afforded by
the local paper is bound to see some aspect of themselves in the plight of the
folks in Grand Rock. This comedy puts the community glue of local paper at its
heart and, ironically (or appropriately) enough, Perlmutter says that the loss
looming over the Grand Rock Weekly Ledger found an unexpected echo during its
shoot. The film, Perlmutter says, came to Midland just when the town lost its
own paper that had brought headlines to the community for a hundred years.
“They really felt the loss,” Perlmutter says when asked how Grand Rock tackles the community spirit
embodied in the local paper, “and so that was a major part in it.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Midland
rallied behind the opportunity play the part of Grand Rock. Perlmutter recalls
stumbling upon Midland in the midst of his search for a location to serve as
the fictional Grand Rock and finding the size and atmosphere of the town far
more appealing than shooting in a studio or around Toronto. The chance of
securing Midland even mirrors the authenticity of the film’s small town
character, for the director recalls pitching Midland its first chance to host a
film shoot just the day before the town council convened for one of its town
meetings, not unlike those seen in the film, where the town voted in favour of
taking the role.
The authentic community spirit of Midland
comes to life in no small part thanks to the active participation of the
townspeople. “We held auditions in Midland for some of the smaller parts,”
Perlmutter says, “and basically the whole town came out. I wish we could have
cast another hundred parts, we had so many great performers come out and people
who had never acted before. It just gives it that feeling of life in a small
town. There’s even a slight accent even though the town is just an hour north
of Toronto.” Big News from Grand Rock
is a fine ensemble film (it co-stars notable Canuck stars like Gordon Pinsent,
Kristin Booth, Aaron Ashmore, and Leah Pinsent), but the best performance
arguably comes from Midland itself as the jovially relatable town as the local
players fit seamlessly with the professional comics and sunny tone of the film.
A film like Big News from Grand Rock couldn’t play out in a big city, since the
enjoyable folly of Leonard’s attempt to save the town puts him in over his head
as he rents films from the local video store and embellishes their stories as
news items for the Ledger. (The film was inspired in part by Hayden
Christensen’s character in the 2003 drama Shattered
Glass.) “There’s an activist element to it,” Esmer argues as he and Perlmutter
elaborate on how the comedy works as a finely contained farce in the small
town, as opposed to the big city. “This would be a relatively minor issue in a
big city, but in a small town, the whole town is up in arms about it,” adds
Perlmutter. To give the problem a sense of scale, the film features a recurring
gag with an aggrieved townie (Art Hindle) who constantly reminds Leonard that
the broken pothole on Main Street is the town’s greatest worry. This seemingly
minor character, Esmer adds, “is driving the whole thing forward by constantly
bringing up the pothole, which seems like a minute concern, but unless you’re
from a small town and you have that kind of accessibility (people talk about
writing a letter to your mister of Parliament to get things done, and this
changed, and it just seems so daunting), but in a small town, you can actually
effect change in that way.” Not only does the running bit sustain itself as
Leonard spews fiction onto the pages of the Ledger, Hindle’s character mirror
Leonard in a way by showing how even the smallest of voices has a large impact.
Leonard, whom audiences might identity as a
man who’s half George Bailey from It’s a
Wonderful Life and half Murray French from The Grand Seduction, offers a rambunctious opportunity for Esmer to
bring to life a kind of classic comedy that’s an increasingly rare presence on
the screen. The actor praises Perlmutter's “openness and malleability” during
the process of making Big News from Grand
Rock. “I think at the beginning Leonard was a bit more dim and not as
verbose,” he says, “my energy is a bit more animated than that, so we took
Leonard as the kind of guy who just can’t stop talking. He just digs holes and
keeps digging more and more and more.”
Esmer’s likable performance draws on
Leonard’s endless earnestness as the character embellishes his fish story about
a conspiracy at the local hospital, which grows greater and greater in
hyperbole as his choices from the video store become more extreme. “I’m
definitely familiar with lying,” he jokes while observing that acting is really
just an extension of lying, much like Leonard discovers as he goes to greater
dramatic lengths to contain his lie, “which made it easy to access Leonard’s
character process.”
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| Aaron Ashmore and Ennis Esmer |
Leonard learns the idiosyncrasies of
journalism as his story attracts the attention of big city reporter named Lucy,
played by Meredith MacNeill (“Peep Show”), and Grand Rock finds a funny harmony in the culture clashes of big city
news media and small town journalism that accentuate Leonard’s anti-hero
appeal. “You see it in those scenes where Lucy comes to town,” says Esmer, “and
he just keeps making things worse, and she’s not buying it and he thinks it’s
working, and so there’s a certain naïveté to Leonard. He doesn’t really get the
consequences of what he’s doing until it all falls apart.”
The city-country contrast between Leonard
and Lucy finds inspiration from the roots of Canadian comedy, and Big News from Grand Rock couldn’t hit
theatres at a better time than when the big city/small town divide is offering
a popular and critical hit in the Canadian comedy series “Schitt’s Creek.” Fans
of the hilarious Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara show seem tailor-made for the
throwback humour of Grand Rock. “How
could you connect us with such talented wonderful people? I detest the very
notion,” Esmer jokes as I suggest that Big
News from Grand Rock feels comfortably at home in a family with the popular
show. But both Big News from Grand Rock and
“Schitt’s Creek” have something else in common: namely, they’re successful hits
in a genre that sometimes eludes Canadian filmmakers. They’re both warmly
relatable and extremely funny, and it probably isn’t a coincidence that both
are connecting with audiences in today’s increasingly over-connected culture.
Levy himself even has a hand in the
development of Big News from Grand Rock,
for he selected Perlmutter as a candidate for a year of mentorship during the
film’s participation in the Canadian Film Centre’s Comedy Lab with Just for
Labs, where Levy and comedy greats like David Frankel (Hope Springs, The Devil Wears Prada) and Daniel Goldberg (The Hangover) offered a wide variety of
feedback and expertise.
“For me,” Perlmutter says after I mention
“Schitt’s Creek,” “I loved that kind of TV growing up. To bring it back to
Eugene Levy, his Bobby Bittman was one of his characters on “SCTV,” and one of
my favourite episodes was when he retires and goes off to live in the country,
and there’s always been something funny to me about the city person who goes to
the country. So there’s a hint of that with Lucy’s character, like when she
butts up against small town life. In fact, in an early draft of the script,
there was a scene where we see her in the city with a scene with her editor
warning her how things work differently in the small towns.”
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| Esmer and Meredith MacNeill |
As Leonard and Lucy run deeper with the
mystery and as romance peppers the investigation explored by this pair of Tracy/Hepburn
foils, film buffs will love the nods to contemporary comedy classics (well, not
“classics” per se, but forgotten gems) that arise as Leonard mines the
resources of the local video store. Films like Larger than Life, Multiplicity,
The Cutting Edge, and Extreme Measures fuel
the farce of Leonard’s fictional scoops with the help of the clerk (Aaron
Ashmore), and the selections for Leonard’s inspiration are a novelty for
cinephiles. They’re also right at home in the small town flavour of the film,
since, as Perlmutter explains, the film choices have to work with the small
town feel. Movies, he says, “that were along the lines of what Big News from Grand Rock is... the kind
of movie that doesn’t really exist anymore.” Whether Big News from Grand Rock takes audiences to a setting they don’t
see often enough or brings a welcome return to a classic era, there’s no
denying that the film is already a hit going into its theatrical release.
Big News from Grand Rock
opens in theatres Feb. 27.
It
screens in Ottawa at Landmark Kanata.
