Doc gives streetcars their close-up
I’ve always figured that if I get around to making a movie set in Toronto, I’ll include a streetcar chase.
It would be obvious to those who ride them every day to play the scene for broad laughs — a villain and a hero, each on streetcars, frantically cursing as they crawl through heavy traffic until they come to a standstill behind a third, disabled streetcar. Or a hero pursuing a streetcar, successfully, on foot.
But there are dramatic action options: the vehicles are enormously heavy and you can picture them ramming cars out of their way; they have the capacity, though it’s seldom used on Toronto streets, to go 80 km/h, and there are stretches of separated track on the Queensway where you could see them really going for a bit; or you could see someone use the crowd on a regular rush hour car as camouflage for a getaway, leading a quiet, cat-and-mouse escape attempt like the one on a subway platform in The French Connection.
It feels like setting a movie in Toronto and not including the streetcars would be missing an opportunity: the way they look and move, their central place in the everyday travel life of the city, and the way they help define everything about downtown streets make them as much a constant in city scenes as highways in Los Angeles, the El trains in Chicago or gondolas in Venice.
A new Imax film by director Stephen Low doesn’t feature a chase, but it goes one better by making Toronto’s streetcars the main character.
The Trolley, a documentary making its world premiere as part of the Hot Docs festival, offers a grand-scale bit of mythologizing of the rumbling, dinging, swooshing rail cars we all know so well.
The film takes on the history of the rise and fall and eventual comeback of streetcars as a widespread, everyday form of travel in North America, Europe and around the world. Its oversimplified and sometimes heavy-handed narrative offers the streetcar as a hero, cars (and subways) as villains, and Toronto as the Edenic setting where the otherwise extinct light rail vehicles never stopped thriving.
The legion of rail fans and transit enthusiasts out there will find lots to nitpick — Steve Munro, Toronto’s most prominent streetcar expert, has already posted a review on his blog pointing out some flaws in the history lesson the film offers — but The Trolley is not an authoritative, comprehensive history of transportation infrastructure. It also doesn’t feel as though that’s what the film set out to be. It’s more like a bit of propagandistic mythology-making — the dramatic voice-over narration could come from an episode of HBO’s 24/7, and the largeformat imagery frames the streetcars in epic proportions as they travel through gorgeous urban streetscapes in Toronto and in Europe.
The imagery is gorgeous, featuring tons of shots of streetcars in action here and in other cities. One camera angle has the lens affixed to the front of a moving streetcar and pointing up, capturing the windshield dramatically in the canyon of office towers in the Financial District. Toronto has never looked so good on film, and neither have our red-andwhite CLRV streetcars.
There are fascinating photos and archival footage from the early 1900s of previous generations of trolleys here and elsewhere, packed full of people and, in some cases, with handrails on the outside for riders hopping on and hanging off the edges.
It is one thing to imagine a time with few private cars on the road, but quite another to see them jammed into hordes of wandering pedestrians and dominated by lines of overflowing streetcars as the odd horse-drawn cart weaves along slowly.
There are times when the film’s rich-voiced hype gets to be a bit much. An image of a mushroom-cloud rising over Hiroshima, for instance, with a line about streetcars “paying the ultimate price” in the atomic attack that ended the Second World War just comes across as bad taste. And describing the streetcar, literally and straightforwardly, as the potential saviour of the world is a little over the top.
Despite these moments, the combination of the images, the dramatization of the historic narrative and the epic approach to the presentation will be invigorating for those who feel sentimental about streetcars (or for whom they are beloved) and are less inclined to nitpicking. Especially in Toronto, because the movie celebrates the city so much and because it makes our streets look so beautiful. I saw it at a preview with an invited group of transit activists, and they looked like kids leaving a superhero movie when the credits rolled.
For anyone who finds all this even mildly interesting, The Trolley is worth seeing. It’s fun to see the city looking like that on such a large screen, and even more fun to see our sometimes beloved streetcars finally ready for their close-up.
The Trolley premieres at the Ontario Place Cinesphere on Saturday.
Edward Keenan is a columnist based in Toronto covering urban affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @thekeenanwire