Movie Review: The Real Place
Cam Christiansen's animated short honours playwright John Murrell
May 4, 2009
(This short screened at Hot Docs 2009)
The National Film Board of Canada and writer/director Cam Christiansen honoured award-winning playwright John Murrell (Democracy, Farther West) with an animated short, The Real Place, which celebrates his life and art.
Although its heart is in the right place, it's also a demonstration of some of the NFB's most pernicious clichés. This short is not so much bad as 40 years too late.
The Real Place: Cam Christiansen's Animated Short Celebrates John Murrell's Life and Work
Texas-born John Murrell (for those who don't know) fled to Canada in 1968 to avoid the Vietnam draft. He taught in Alberta's public school system until the success of his second play, 1975's Power in the Blood, encouraged him to write plays full-time. Since then, he has written many successful plays, two of which (Farther West and Waiting for the Parade) were filmed for Canadian television.
He also translated Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya for the Stratford Festival, and Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder and The Doll House for the Tarragon Theatre.
In 2003, Murrell was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada and he won the Governor General's Lifetime Artistic Achievement award five years later.
You won't get any of this information from The Real Place; no, this short is far too avant-garde for that. Instead it features Murrell discussing his lifelong love affair with literature and opera while an animated image of his face distorts and shifts through a lysergic haze. Various other anonymous types recite soliloquies – presumably from his plays – while Puccini's aria from Tosca, "Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore" ("I lived for art, I lived for love"), plays in the background.
This short has a late 60's/early 70's feel to it, the psychedelic imagery and collage collisions suggesting that someone dropped some Owlsley's Old Original and rabbited on about The Tibetan Book of the Dead and becoming "the avatars of the New Consciousness" (whatever the frakk that means) prior to animating this short. It's all terribly precious, and would have blown minds back in the Free Love era. Now, it just feels dated.
Not being familiar with Murrell's work means that this review can't discuss its artistic merits; however, this short doesn't accomplish its major goal: making the viewer care about John Murrill and his art.
The Final Analysis
While no one denies the National Film Board of Canada's importance and its reason for existing (okay, possibly Stephen Harper and the far right but they're too busy trying to figure out how the economic meltdown happened), one would wish that the NFB would let go of their exalted past, rediscover the power of story, and quit trying to pursue a style that was avant-garde for the Woodstock generation. At this rate, they've become a parody of themselves.
The Real Place looks dated, and doesn't really honour its subject. It gets a 4/10.
 |
