KINGSWAY THE MOVIE
Film captures spirit of quirky street
When it came time to name his new movie, writer/director Bruce Sweeney said he ran some ideas past his cast and crew.
“I said The Love Life of Horvaths, and everyone I floated that out to said ‘That’s the worst title I’ve ever heard,’” Sweeney said, while adding that Horvath is the family’s name in the film.
“Then I said, ‘What about Kingsway?’ Everyone said: ‘I like the name Kingsway because I don’t know exactly what it means, but I feel that I would go see a movie called Kingsway regardless of content or anything.’ It just had a flow, and everyone seemed to like it.”
It also helps that the film is set in and around the famous Vancouver street, a street that has left many people scratching their heads over its diagonal course from Main Street and Seventh Avenue in Vancouver to the Burnaby/NewWestminster border.
A character in Kingsway even bemoans the fact the former First Nations walking trail then midcentury wagon road doesn’t play by standard grid rules.
For Sweeney the street’s unconventional course is a perfect match for the emotional action that takes place in his funny but poignant and heartfelt family story.
“I like Kingsway,” Sweeney said. “It’s kind of a loose metaphor for relationships. You think you go in one way then you go in another.”
Kingsway is part of the Sea to Sky/B.C. Spotlight program at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), on until Oct. 12.
The film, packed full of modern neuroses, focuses on a mother and her two messed-up adult kids. The son (Jeff Gladstone) is dealing with a marriage falling apart and suffers from depression. The daughter (Camille Sullivan) is angry with everyone. Mom Marion (Gabrielle Rose) is an optimist who has made the mistake of becoming her daughter’s best friend and the family’s emotional enabler.
At the end of the day they are a team — a dysfunctional one, but a team nonetheless.
“I think it is a story about a place where you can be safe, where you can lose your temper, where you can be a jerk, but you can still come home and there’s somebody who gets it. They might be mad at you, but they still get you and they’ll look after you,” Rose said. “It’s the safe place, the safe haven of family.”
Interestingly, Rose’s description of the family dynamic within the film also works in a way to describe the dynamic on the set.
“I’m a real suck. I don’t like to be out of my element with people I don’t know. I am just not really good with that, and I think also a set should function so that the actor can say to the director: ‘I think you are full of s--t,’ and the director can say ‘I think you’re, whatever,’” said Sweeney, whose past films include Last Wedding, Dirty and The Dick Knost Show.
“It’s an open kind of set because we all know each other and we’re family, and you know how you treat family, you tell them whatever is on your mind.
“There is no other layer of meaning. I just find a lot of times you have actors or crew that just don’t work. I get off track then ... I start thinking about issues that aren’t about the film and then it’s just terrible. I wish I had more mental fortitude.”
Rose really is a familiar face to Sweeney: Before Kingsway the pair made The Dick Knost Show, Excited, and Crimes of Mike Reckett together.
“We certainly have a language that we speak. So that’s a great thing for me. It’s a shorthand kind of thing,” Rose said. “I know that he is going to be brutally honest with me and I try to do the same with him.”
The pair’s collaborations begin well before shooting. Rose said she and Sweeney get together to talk about what it is the characters are going to talk about.
“We just start a dialogue. It’s off and on, not every week or anything like that. A few months might go by then we get together, read it, or get the whole cast together, read it, or sometimes just email back and forth,” Rose said. “It’s usually really positive because he is such a great writer.”
Sweeney volleys that sentiment back to Rose, saying he relies on the veteran actor to massage dialogue and put it in the character’s voice.
“From a writer’s point of view, I give her these texts, these words, dialogue, and I say, ‘This is kind of clunky, I don’t know if you could make this work,’ and she does, and she makes it sound like it’s just a person saying that. I think that’s a real gift, to be a dialogue muncher like that,” Sweeney said.
In Kingsway, Rose’s Marion is trying to encourage her adult children to move forward with their lives but still stay within arm’s reach. There is an unease that comes with watching her navigate the emotional minefields that her children leave scattered around their lives.
“I think Marion is a benign, extremely happy person and she has two really unhappy kids and is completely confused by their unhappiness. She does not understand and she wants to be included in their lives. The more she wants, that the more they don’t want her,” Rose said. “At the same time she has a really symbiotic relationship with her daughter. They’re a team and without each other they wouldn’t be able to navigate the world as well as they actually do.
“There are times when she should kick them in the backside and she doesn’t, and that’s her fatal flaw. She’d rather be a friend then a proper parent,” Rose added.
That mistake is clear as day when you see the family in action; these people are complicated and emotionally messy characters.
“I love these characters. I want to fight for them, pull for them, even if at times they are really quite unflattering,” Sweeney said.
Son Matt is struggling. His wife Lori (Colleen Rennison) has cheated on him and he is depressed, a familiar state throughout his whole life. It’s through him that mental health becomes part of the discussion. That discussion becomes multi-layered as we watch Jessica journey from angry protector to a vulnerable woman who struggles with intimacy and personal insight.
Her issues run through every part of this story until finally her shields fall and she realizes that she is part of the family dynamic, not just an observer.
“She’s so dismissive, then she confronts herself and comes to a new understanding of it,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney has eight feature films to his name. Some have been well received and some others have not. That is the nature of the game and Sweeney understands that. The good news here, though, is Kingsway is a solid film and has been reviewed as such at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. One reviewer called it Sweeney’s best film in years.
“I totally feel that, yes” Sweeney said. “Comedy, romance, drama, I’m very comfortable with. If I get out of that, which I have done, I just feel like I am swimming upstream; I feel as if it is not coming naturally. I feel like I am forcing it, but with something like this I think ‘no, no, no, I know who these people are. I can make this movie.’
“You feel it on the set, too . ... You know you can start a movie and after a couple of days you think, oh, man, I should just shoot myself in the face, it’s just not going well.’ You just feel it. The crew feels it. Everyone feels it. And there is some indecision and there is some arguing, but this one just had a real sweet feel right off the bat. We workshopped this like crazy, so we were just totally prepared.”
The film leads a strong contingent of 11 B.C. films at this year’s VIFF. For Sweeney, and other independent filmmakers, the festival scene is an important part of their success.
“It means the world for smaller pictures like this to have this kind of push,” said Sweeney, adding movies with small marketing budgets need the word of mouth that comes out of festivals.
“You’ve got to have that for these little films.”