by Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Alan Cumming, Charlie Creed-Miles, Clare Coulter, Sprague Grayden, Gray Powell
Intro:
Frequently funny and sensationally photographed …
Marking a return to the silver screen following a near-decade absence – last seen in in 2017’s plucky sports biopic Battle of the Sexes – Alan Cumming brings a compelling lead performance to Canadian director Michael Clowater’s Drive Back Home.
Set between the everybody-knows-everybody hamlet of Stanley, New Brunswick and the bright lights of big-city Toronto, the film follows the Straight Story-esque journey taken by one brother to reconnect with another
The 1,000-mile journey across the bleak, beautiful Canadian winter is aided by the austere time period – November 1970 – in which homosexuality is still punishable by a prison sentence. Such is the film’s driving event, as black sheep Perley (Alan Cumming) has been arrested in Ontario for having sex with another man in a public bathroom and needs to be brought home by his earthy, no-nonsense brother (Charlie Creed-Miles).
The film is staggeringly handsome, presenting countless sublimely framed images of the vast Canadian wilderness, cloaked in gleaming silver snow. The rural settings in small-town Canada are also exquisitely realised in their whispering loneliness, like the Technicolor Americana of Stephen Shore photographs, only without the colour.
There are plenty of instances that allow for Cumming to flex his eyebrow-waggling sass and quick-fire witticisms, but there is much in his performance that hints at the shame and fear that he carries with him from his small-town beginnings.
While Drive Back Home is not explicitly about homophobia, it remains a rife thread throughout the story. A violent backroads bar brawl, toward the end of the film, is the most violent expression of how dangerous small-minded attitudes can be, perhaps as much today as in the film’s 1970 setting.
The road trip format of the film’s extended second act does sag somewhat – how interesting can two men bickering in a truck really be? – but the pacing is brisk enough to ensure that we are not as bored as the two leads must eventually have been on such a long drive.
Frequently funny and sensationally photographed, Drive Back Home presents a vibrant, textured performance from Cumming and inadvertently serves as a remarkable tourism advert for southeast Canada.
