The Hanging Garden (19

 

I watched Canadian writer / director / actor Thom Fitzgerald's observant but little-seen debut film The Hanging Garden (1997) the other night and was touched by its emotional currency.

The film is a darkly comedic but also troubling tale of family dysfunction and individual survival. It presents to viewers the private hell of a young man named Sweet William (many of the film's characters are named after flowers or herbs) who returns to his rural Nova Scotia home for his older sister's wedding.

William (played as an adult by Chris Leavins) returns much changed. A slender, handsome 25-year-old, William left 10 years before when he weighed 350 pounds (Troy Veinotte). He was glumly resigned to beatings from his alcoholic gardening father called Poppy (Peter MacNeill). He was numb to the diffidence of his mother, Iris, (Seana McKenna) and the raving strictures of his Catholic grandmother, Grace (Joan Orenstein). His only champion was his foul-mouthed / firebrand sister, Rosemary, played as an adult by Kerry Fox and as a teen by Sarah Polley. When he comes back he discovers a new addition to the family: the tomboyish 10-year-old Violet (Christine Dunsworth), introduced to him as his sister.

The film's mise-en-scène is a rustic, multi-storied house and its neighboring garden that Poppy tends assiduously and forces young William to care for with the same attention or be beaten. The other family members are spared this treatment but are battered by Poppy's profanity and self-pity.

When he's 15, William discovers mutual attraction to a neighbor boy (played by Joel Keller). When grandmother Grace sees him and young Fletcher in the garden, Iris arranges for William to spend some time with a local prostitute (Martha Irving) to set the boy back on the right path. She waits outside the bedroom during the exchange. All of this ends disastrously.

Impressively, Fitzgerald interweaves past and present, reality and fantasy in this story of regret and repression. The movie has a lot to say about the hollowing out effect of physical and emotion abuse that happens in an insular world dominated by a tyrant.

William survives his abuse by leaving, a departure that is acted out in startling metaphor in the hanging scene that gives the picture its name.

But he discovers old wounds never fully heal -- they get covered by joy and contentment.