The Drawer Boy
(Canada, 98 min.)
Dir. Arturo
Pérez Torres, Aviva Armour-Ostroff; Writ. Michael Healey, Arturo Pérez
Torres
Starring: Richard Clarkin, Stuart Hughes, Jakob Ehman
The Drawer Boy is
a contemporary classic of Canadian theatre and the film adaptation could enjoy
similar esteem. This stage-to-screen take on Michael Healey’s acclaimed play is
a refreshingly vibrant drama. Some audiences might find the adaptation a bit too talky and a bit too stagey, but stick with it. The Drawer Boy is a sparse, small-scale affair smartly told
that takes the bare essences of good filmmaking—a good story, strong actors,
and a sense of cinematic space—and bundles them together like a sturdy bale of
wheat. It’s nice to have a Canadian film to get excited about again.
The film, like the play, centres on a trio of characters and the fields of drama that secrets sow. Miles (Jakob Ehman) arrives at a farm outside the Podunk town of Clinton, Ontario circa 1970 and he offers a modest proposition to farmers Morgan (Richard Clarkin) and Angus (Stuart Hughes). Miles, a city slicker from a Toronto acting troupe, wants to write a play about farm life and hopes that Morgan and Angus will let him research their daily chores and habits. The men agree since they could use an extra hand for their labour.
Miles, being the artistic type, is not suited for manual
labour. A minor accident leads Angus running for some ice cubes to soothe
Morgan’s pain, but, in a jarring moment, the man freezes in the kitchen, lost
in thought. He returns with some cough syrup. And does so each time Morgan asks
for ice. Angus must have Alzheimer’s or dementia, one can guess from the look
on Miles’s somewhat bewildered face as he watches Morgan patiently endure a
routine that is obviously familiar.
The more Miles observes the two friends, the more material
he finds for a great story. Storytelling, see, is at the heart of the
relationship between Morgan and Angus. It ultimately unites and divides them.
Miles discovers the significance of storytelling in their friendship as he
overhears their tales and appropriates them for his play without permission but
with ample dramatic license.
The act of storytelling reveals Morgan to be both Angus’s
protector and his captor. He hypnotises Angus with the story of “The Drawer
Boy,” a stand-in for Angus himself who was injured in a freak accident during
the war and lost many cognitive skills including memory. (He is, however, a
whiz with numbers.) The tale of “The Drawer Boy” provides Clarkin with a rich
monologue. He navigates the vicissitudes of the friends’ fortunes and takes his
pal through a yarn of ironies and cruel fates as Angus learns of love found and
lost during the war. Angus, however, also finds a happy ending in the friend
who stands by him through thick and thin. Told with theatrical flair, the key
monologues of The Drawer Boy draw out
the best of film’s theatrical origins as the story shifts loyalties and
allegiances, both within the characters themselves and between the audience and
the characters, through each act of telling as the monologues draw viewers into
the characters’ rich psychology.
The Draw Boy also
harnesses its dramatic origins to its advantage during these sequences.
Theatrical lighting conveys Angus’s shifts in consciousness as spotlights
remove him from reality and buoy him in the dreamy connections he feels for his
long lost beau Sally. Hughes conveys through silence what Clarkin wields with
words and The Drawer Boy creates a
unique interplay between film and theatre during this sequences that embellish
the story within the story. Ehman rounds out the trio of strong performances by
bringing a tighter style of acting that caters to the camera lens and contrasts
nicely with Clarkin’s work that is more theatrically inclined. While Miles is
the actor, Morgan is the one putting on a show.
The story of The
Drawer Boy also sits nicely within a tradition of Canadian drama as it
observes country life with a peculiar eye. Miles’s farm show calls to mind the
classic NFB documentary Paper Wheat,
which tells of an acting troupe touring rural Saskatchewan and making plays
about harvests and cows and is undoubtedly some inspiration for Christopher
Guest’s Waiting for Guffman with its
folksy slice of life humour. What the actors in Paper Wheat and The Drawer
Boy (and, admittedly, Waiting for
Guffman) share is an affinity for experimentation as thespians tumble
through the fields and try to find a way to represent rural life—yet ultimately
exploit it along the way. The Drawer Boy
refreshes a tale about the power of storytelling in preserving and perverting
history, of revising it for the winners and revisiting it in the years that
follow. As this adaptation shows, it’s a story that can endure through the art
of retelling, restaging, and re-imagining.
The Drawer Boy
opens Nov. 23 at the Carlton and streams soon on Highball TV.
