Drive Back Home 

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome - Photos courtesy of Photon Films
29 NOV 2024 -

Drive Back Home has been deservedly collecting awards on the film festival circuit, and I was lucky enough to see it before it screened at the Rendezvous with Madness festival. Here is my brief review from the Rendezvous with Madness festival preview with a few further thoughts below it.

If you did something so bad that it caused your family to turn their back on you, what does that say about you?
You're asking that question the wrong way around.

The plot synopsis—"In the winter of 1970, a cantankerous, small town plumber from rural New Brunswick, must drive his beat-up work truck 1000 miles to Toronto to get his estranged, gay brother out of jail after being arrested for having sex in a public park"—tells only the bare bones of the story. Drive Back Home is not only a character study, as all great road movies are, of the two brothers, it is also an evocative dissection of the morals and repression of family life. Charlie Creed-Miles as the brother Weldon, the one with the truck, has an astonishing character arc handled with subtlety and power. Forced by his mother, the great Clare Coulter, to go and fetch his miscreant brother, Alan Cumming as Perley—who modulates the flamboyance and eccentricity into heartbreaking empathy—there are years of unspoken secrets and questions to be unraveled. It is implied that Weldon has, besides a hearing impairment, a learning disability of some sort, and Perley is host to numerous addictions (including a queasily presented sexual one) and a far too cute taste for taxidermy. Both suffer from repressed trauma.

Writer/director Michael Clowater and cinematographer Stuart Campbell seamlessly weave a recreation of the 1970s, the proliferation of stubbies is instantly evocative, with archival road footage to create a heightened reality for the characters to inhabit. The image quality feels like Canadian films of the period with just enough grain and lots of chill to add grit. Drive Back Home is based on a true story and it both reads as genuine while gently carrying the timeless heft of a folk tale. It opens with footage of  media coverage of the gay community from the time, but instead of the nostalgia or anger that is usually aroused by such usage, it presents a melancholy, a sadness over where we were. That is the lesson that Weldon is to learn though, to the film's credit, Perley is far from a gay paragon of virtue come to show him the way. While we understand Perley's drives and reactions, we are also shown the questionable nature of some of his choices. There is much resignation and recrimination (and repression) but threaded through with a gentle humour that leads to a climactic scene, following a few horrific ones, that is uplifting and incredibly satisfying. The question is finally asked the right way around.

However on the eve of its theatrical release, and after having the film steep in my brain, there are a few notes to add.  While the '70s were an explosive time for gay and sexual liberation, it was certainly less so in rural New Brunswick and even in still staid Toronto. For most, coming out of the closet wasn't even an option, the best that could be hoped for was venturing into the shadowy subculture and hope to not get caught or discovered. Or, like Alan Cumming's character, the dangerous thrill of furtive but impassioned sex in cruising areas. When first viewing Drive Back Home I questioned the huge risk that the character takes, even with the abundant appeal of Alexandre Bourgeois as the small town boy. Context is everything. Drive Back Home does an astounding job of creating the feel of the '70s, the vicious ignorance of the majority mindset, and even evokes the desperation and repression within which we lived. The chance to tryst in a small town bar washroom with a handsome stranger didn't come along every day, and was an erotic opportunity that couldn't be passed up even with the knowledge that it would likely lead to violence. It was necessity not a sexual addiction.

While still marvelling at the nuanced performance by Charlie Creed-Miles—balancing exasperation, familial duty, puzzlement and dawning admiration—hindsight registers the way Cumming handles history. Adding just a touch of effeminacy and style, both brave acts, to a character struggling to fit in to a world that doesn't want to see it but will judge him regardless. Those signals are needed to trigger the gaydar of any other gay man he may have the luck to meet. How those communications happened, so covertly in a time before the general public knew what to note, is bittersweet. A stereotype struggling to be unique. As the character's pretensions, and they are hilarious and heartbreaking, get stripped away, Cumming becomes a singular fraudulent diva who has been knocked on his ass. The duo have incredible interplay as they reluctantly are forced to confront their past trauma, live through their present adversity and animosity, and establish a future that was previously inconceivable. I'm still not sure if the pug makes the ensemble a trio.