Black Eyed Dog
Directed by Pierre Gang
Written by Jeremy John Bouchard
Starring Sonya Salomaa, David Boutin and James Hyndman
Classification: NA
Rating: **
Crummy small towns don't come any crummier than the setting of Black Eyed Dog. Riverton is a fictional burg on the Miramichi River in northern New Brunswick; it's a grungy, hopeless place where every yard includes a dilapidated truck, a barking dog or both. A waitress at the local diner, Betty (Sonya Salomaa) once thought her music might take her away from all this crap, but she's given up on her dreams of escape. Instead, this one-time would-be Joni Mitchell gets through her days in a state of barely contained rage, something that can't be good for a woman who depends on tips to earn a living.
Director Pierre Gang and writer Jeremy John Bouchard make sure Betty has no shortage of problems to keep her down. There's the legacy of her parents' shattered marriage and her mother's mental illness. There's her fraught relationship with Wayne (David Boutin), her hot-tempered ex-boyfriend. There's her desire to protect Wayne's sensitive younger brother, David (Brendan Fletcher), and avoid her own needy sister, Carol (Nadia Litz). And, last and surprisingly least, there's the sinister presence of an escaped con who has been raping and killing women all along the Miramichi, thereby making Riverton an even more unattractive destination for prospective tourists.
The second feature by the director of the 1996 French-Canadian hit Sous-sol, Black Eyed Dog makes for grim viewing. Unfortunately, it's rarely worth the slog. The hardscrabble Maritime milieu is familiar from the novels and stories of David Adams Richards, but with its simplistic characters and unsubtle dialogue, Black Eyed Dog is a poor cousin to the features and TV movies derived from Richards's works, especially Tim Southam's underrated 2002 screen adaptation of The Bay of Love and Sorrows.
Unlike those predecessors, Gang's film doesn't know what it wants to be. The elements of kitchen-sink social realism are undermined by showier moments of melodrama. At times, it toys with the idea of becoming a psychological thriller or even a horror film (it is set near Halloween, after all). Yet that aspect is poorly handled - barely seen and largely irrelevant, the serial killer might as well have wandered in from a neighbouring movie production.
The appearance of Corner Gas's resident doofus, Fred Ewanuick, as a cop is equally incongruous, seeing as Black Eyed Dog has none of the sitcom's affection for small-town existence. Pain, cruelty and frustration are what define life in Riverton. Though some of the cast has trouble bearing the weight of all this anguish, Salomaa brings both toughness and a wary intelligence to the lead role. She also makes the most of the film's thin vein of humour, such as when Betty tells a would-be suitor, "I like my men like I like my steak - tough and local." But her pluck only briefly raises Black Eyed Dog out of its dark funk of mediocrity. Like Betty, viewers may soon feel like they'd do anything to get the hell out of town.
Special to The Globe and Mail