Review: Canvas

The refusal to explain the roots of its protagonist’s madness gives her husband’s desire to summon happier days a bewitching poignancy.

Canvas

In its opening minutes, Canvas invites comparison to one of those Jack Handy “Deep Thoughts” sketches from SNL. Minutes later it’s still rough-going, with Mary Marino (Marcia Gay Harden) flaunting her Overprotective Mother Syndrome when her Danny Pintauro lookalike of a son walks in through the door with a smile on his face and a hole in his shirt. As soon as Mary cuts up one of Chris’s (Devon Gearhart) good shirts in order to patch the hole in the beat-up one, I was ready to bolt from the screening and go looking for a new pair of Converse because my old ones are falling apart, but I like Harden, and the need to find out if she would allow her performance to stoop to the grotesque level of Signorney Weaver’s dubious interpretation of autism spectrum in Marc Evan’s abysmal Snow Cake finally won out.

The good news is that she doesn’t, but that may have something to do with the fact that Harden only plays a schizophrenic, and the Academy Award-winner practically disappears from the film after her character is institutionalized for a second time, leaving Chris and her husband, John (Joe Pantoliano0), to fend for themselves in their home in Hollywood, Florida. Canvas indulges one of my bigger pet peeves by scoring its sweeter moments to cheap adult contemporary music, but writer-director Joseph Greco’s refusal to explain the roots of Mary’s madness gives John’s desperate desire to summon happier days—by building a boat in the family’s backyard—a bewitching poignancy.

John builds while the whiny Chris sews, starting a bona fide business in school when the girls respond positively to the horror of his patched shirt; it’s the film’s queerest angle, but it’s also one of many unbelabored metaphors for Chris and John’s struggle to keep on truckin’. The sight of father and son sailing together, the absent Mary represented by the artwork used to patch the holes in the ship’s sail, is an image as resonant as the ocean is deep.

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Score: 
 Cast: Joe Pantoliano, Marcia Gay Harden, Devon Gearhart, Sophia Bairley, Marcus Johns, Antony Del Rio  Director: Joseph Greco  Screenwriter: Joseph Greco  Distributor: Screen Media Films  Running Time: 101 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2006  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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