Trouble with the plot

Stellar acting elevates this fascinating film

TROUBLE

IN THE GARDEN ••• out of 5

Cast: Cara Gee, Jon Cor Director: Roz Owen Duration: 1 h 20 m Trouble in the Garden is a well-meaning Canadian drama with a reach that exceeds its grasp.

But its efforts, and the quality of the acting, already put it head-and-shoulders above most low-budget dramas, so let’s not be too hard on it.

Cara Gee (Empire of Dirt) stars as Pippa Mactavish, who is in the process of getting arrested as the film begins.

The Indigenous woman looks down at her mugshot nameplate, then up at the camera: “My name is Raven,” she snarls.

How “Raven” wound up with a name that sounds like she should be skipping through a field of Scottish heather is one of several plot points that intersect just a little too neatly in writer-director Roz Owen’s debut big-screen feature.

Her fuzzy family circumstances start to come into focus when her clearly non-indigenous brother Colin (Jon Cor) bails her out of jail and puts her up in his house.

His very pregnant wife, Alice (Kelly Van der Burg), bristles at the intrusion. We then learn that Colin and Raven’s parents are on holiday in Scotland, researching their ancestry.

So the background is sketched out. Raven was adopted by the Mactavishes, then disowned for being “a difficult teenager,” which begs for some additional explanation.

She hasn’t spoken to her adoptive family in years, and she never met her real mother.

Meanwhile, in the foreground of the story is an Indigenous demonstration over a new housing development on Indigenous land. Colin, wouldn’t you know, is a realtor working this very region, and his current house sits on a patch of land that drew its own protest years earlier.

It’s all a bit too narratively convenient, and loudly signposted by Indigenous music on the soundtrack whenever Raven has something important to say.

And the drama comes screeching to a halt when Alice asks Raven to explain the history of her struggle. Her speech is eloquent but, again, a little too on the nose.

Cor is fine as the brother, and you can’t go wrong with Fiona Reid and Frank Moore as parents, but it’s Gee who really carries the movie, her performance moving delicately between varying degrees of joy and anguish. Her character is troubled and driven by a sense of social justice, but she also carries great reserves of caring and humour. It’s no wonder Gee was named a rising star to watch at the recent Whistler Film Festival, where she starred in the sci-fi comedy Red Rover, about a man applying for a one-way trip to Mars. She also stars in the upcoming drama Lone Wolf Survival Kit and has a continuing role in TV’S The Expanse. She is reason enough to see this flawed but fascinating film.