Playwright Daniel MacIvor usually finds solace in offbeat and quirky material, some of which challenges theatre audiences to their very bones. However, the people in his new film Wilby Wonderful aren't overly wacky, as we might expect in a Canadian movie about smalltown life. They are three-dimensional people, and interact with each other much like an ensemble might in a Robert Altman or an Atom Egoyan film. They share each other's pains, obstacles and pleasures.
Starring a veritable cast of who's who in Canadian cinema, the story takes place over the span of one day in the rural island community of Wilby (the province is conveniently left unspecified, though the film was shot in Shelburne, Nova Scotia and in Ontario). Rebecca Jenkins is Sandra Anderson, a single mother who runs Wilby's second-best diner, along with her curious teenage daughter Emily (Ellen Page, in a fresh performance). Emily has been sneaking off with Taylor (Caleb Langille), a horny teen with a one-track mind, and Sandra has been sneaking off with Buddy French (Paul Gross), the local constable whose wife (Sandra Oh) is a real estate agent is trying to finalize the sale of a house to the boisterous mayor (Maury Chaykin).
Meanwhile, a down-on-his-luck video store owner named Dan Jarvis (James Allodi) has been trying to commit suicide, having recently "outed" himself to his wife out of despair from a looming article in the local newspaper that will name names in a decidedly public fashion. Duck MacDonald (Callum Keith Rennie) is a dyslexic painter who is attracted to Jarvis and tries to reach out to him. Mary Ellen MacLean plays Irene, the busybody who says all the mean things to the two outcasts of the community.
A strong character piece such as Wilby Wonderful requires consistent performance or the bottom will fall out from under it, and because it totters between comedy, tragedy and drama, the gear-shifting needs to be seamless. Writer/director MacIvor has succeeded on this front. Although a nicely shot film, the surprising element that's not quite up to snuff is the script itself. It's a good thing Ellen Page and Caleb Langille give strong turns as the young adolescents, because the cliched scenes of the insensitive teenage boy who tries to take advantage of his girlfriend are beneath MacIvor's aptitude for glistening dialogue. He also gives the townspeople the kind of pejorative lines about homosexuals that would only be put into a story that inevitably will provide an equally overt, heavyhanded message of tolerance.
Among the best performances in the film are Sandra Oh as a manic woman with her cellphone strapped firmly to her ear, Paul Gross reprising a familiar vocation as a cop, and Ellen Page as the girl who seems at times to have more sense about her than most of the adults in her life.
MacIvor, who has a supporting role as Buddy's eager police partner, excels in making Wilby Wonderful a modern commentary on the growing lack of privacy in the world around us, even in small towns. As the characters' lives intertwine, we are reminded how each of them is desparately looking to love and to be loved, and by the time its inter-woven plot has come full circle, the film manages to illicit a lukewarm yet affectionate response. Thank goodness its coy title, which gave me traumatic flashbacks to the similarly ill-named but over-hyped Good Will Hunting, is sweetly à propos. In fact, if our homegrown writers and directors can continue to yield this kind of quality product, then the Canadian film industry will be wonderful indeed.
