Review // The Grand Seduction

Don Mckellar’s The Grand Seduction plucks at your Canadian heartstrings with its appeal to the small town lifestyle and working class values, but stumbles when it tries to make a larger point.

In the film’s opening scene we are introduced to Tickle Head, a small fishing village which used to be home to hardworking families of fishermen. As we see in flashback, the townspeople used to take pride in working an honest day, before coming home and working an honest night. However times have changed for Tickle Head, and now the men spend their days sauntering down to the welfare office before drinking the day away on the government dime.

This woeful state of affairs is presented to us by Murray (Brendan Gleeson) a type of town patriarch who resents having to live on the government hand-out, even if he takes double his share. The only hope for the town lies in a petrochemical company that is considering Tickle Head for the site of a new recycling centre. In order to secure the contract the town needs a resident doctor, something it has been unable to find for quite some time. Enter Dr. Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) a big city plastic surgeon who (through a major coincidence) is sent for a mandatory one month stay in the town. Murray quickly rallies the 120 person population into doing everything in their power to seduce the doctor, from feigning a proclivity for cricket (the doctor’s favourite sport), to leaving money on the ground for him to find (everyone loves finding money!), to suggesting the town’s one young woman (Liane Balaban) could show him some “interest”. It’s the titular grand seduction, and of course it’s all an elaborate lie.

While it takes it’s time getting going, once the wooing of Dr. Lewis has begun the film is a charming little comedy. A deep cast of comic players all gleefully riff on their particular gag (Mary Walsh is great as the housewife tasked with listening in on his phone calls and Mark Critch’s bank teller afraid of being replaced by an ATM is hilarious) while Taylor Kitsch turns what seems like a pretty one-dimensional “asshole” character into (by the end) the film’s most likeable presence. It’s a great performance by the young actor, who provides a moral touchstone among a town of liars.

The Grand Seduction is a pretty straight remake of Ken Scott’s 2003 french language film of the same name. In fact Scott helped adapt the screenplay with the help of Michael Dowse, and one wonders how much “adaptation” was actually necessary. The biggest change made by director Don Mckellar and his screenwriters is giving the film a firmer basis in the real world. While Scott’s original had a dreamy, folk-tale feel about it, Mckellar’s is unquestionably set in modern Newfoundland. This makes the muddled moral message of the film a bit troublesome.

The film seems to suggest that small town Canada is the hub of our national morality, and that the city is an ugly place of drugs and cheating spouses. This will probably confirm the beliefs of a lot of small towners, but it’s hardly even supported by the film itself. The characters are happy to procure an illegal bank loan and use it to bribe the head of an oil-company, but social assistant is viewed as a terrible thing? There’s something amiss here…

If viewed as a satire, Don Mckellar has done a heck of a job, crafting a film that appeals to the imagined moral superiority of rural Canada while simultaneously skewering it. If not, it’s just another example of a Canadian film based on a national identity that went stale fifty years ago. Either way, The Grand Seduction is a well written and well acted piece of comedy filmmaking that will most likely appeal to large audiences. So go out and support a Canadian production doing it’s best to duke it out with the big boys at the summer box office. We’ll figure out all this identity stuff later…

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.

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