Weirdsville

By Kate Xian
November 08, 2007

Canada has always had this unexplainable image of affability. It's puzzled me for years why we haven't been able to move beyond the image of lumberjacks, stumbling drunkeness, or wasted banality. Weirdsville has thankfully cleared that right up. It's because we're all high, confused and lost. At least our cinema is.

Weirdsville is an ironically complicated yet simple tale of two stoners, Dexter and Royce who mistakenly think their best friend Matilda (Taryn Manning) has overdosed. But wait, that's not all, they owe the Russian mob - or at least what we think is the Russian mob - eight grand, try to save a hippie dot com millionaire, and are saved by knight dwarves, all the while outrunning a clan of Satanic worshippers led by, the once virtuous, Abel (Greg Bryk).

Confused? Mmm, not really. Raise your eyebrows? Yeah, I did that too.

The heroes played by Scott Speedman and Wes Bentley respectively, are somewhat miscast, but still manage to churn out oddly nice performances. Their characters are rather one and a half dimensional. Dexter struggles to overcome his drug addiction to ultimately "find" himself, but paradoxically forgets his own character motivations when suddenly faced with any predicament. Wow, that half really goes a long way, doesn't it?

It's these types of haphazard moments that go largely unquestioned onscreen, as if viewers wouldn't notice. Why did Dexter have that whole spiel of getting his life back on track yet reach for another joint right afterward when he didn't know what to do? The stagnant "character arcs," if you can call it that, led to meaningless characters all across the board that we really didn't care much at all about. It was clear that the actors had more range than their characters often allowed.

Bentley takes quite a turn here from the type of roles that have made him famous - abandoning the broody, creepy, yet sensitive type he so masterfully played in American Beauty and the upcoming P2. This time around he opts for the goofy, daft, marijuana-dependent Royce. Like Dexter, Royce too has that extra added half to his one dimensionality. That half in his character can really be described in one solitary moment in the film where he attempts to convince Dexter to pick himself back up. Ah, Dexter and Royce - best friends - yet each only a half a glimmer away from what could have been a single two dimensional character. Inner conflict hasn't been so sorely missed!

The title itself is also a disappointing take on the concept of weird. Truth be told - I've seen weirder. And done better. Weirdsville comes off as predictable yet somehow trapped in an entirely different realm of filmmaking. A gritty, seedy film texture, often reserved for films engrossed in the underbelly of the darkest corners of the city, is used in Weirdsville for a setting that is, yes, the seedy underbelly of (perhaps) suburbia (?!). As weird as this film is intended to be, the sincerity of the world is lacking and is instead plastic. With cliché ironies and conventional humour, Weirdsville does little for the imagination. The unnecessary use of a C-plot, D-plot and E-plot only deter from any possible emotional connection we might have had with Dexter, Royce, or Matilda.

Weirdsville all in all is a film filled with cheap tricks that forcefully try to get you laughing. I mean really, how many times am I going to hear the lowbrow excuse of, "because midgets are funny"? Unfortunately, ignorance isn't so much. Throwing in complete random absurdity, implausible characters, and non-sensical uses of visual gimmicks, does not make a good story. Not even a passable one. Weirdsville ultimately falls flat on its face. Where is the tightly focused and emotionally engaging indie art film that we know our filmmakers can make! Where is that sense of urgency characters need so badly in order to actually flesh out a film? It's all missing. And unlucky for Weirdsville so is much of everything else.

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Certification: Canada: 14A
Director: Allan Moyle
Producer: Nicholas Tabarrok
Executive Producers: Michael Baker, Morris Ruskin, and Perry Zimel
Screenplay: Willem Wennekers
Director of Photography: Adam Swica
Editor: Michael Doherty
Music: John Rowley