National Post (National Edition)
HOME AGAIN
It’s long struck me as one of the more bizarre bureaucratic bungles that someone who has spent 28 of their 30 years in Canada can be sent “back where you came from!” because of a criminal record. Surely such a problem is Canada’s to deal with?
Toronto filmmaker Sudz Sutherland clearly has a similar bone to pick. Home Again, his first feature since 2003’s Love, Sex and Eating
the Bones, tells linked stories about a Jamaican-born American, Canadian and Briton — three of the thousands of deportees living in Jamaica. (A 2007 New York Times story put the number of such cases at 33,268, or more than 1% of the island nation’s population.)
In short (and slightly clunky) order, we’re introduced to the protagonists. Marva (Tatyana Ali) is a 26-year-old mother who left two kids in Toronto when she was sent packing. Dunston (Lyriq Bent) was involved in petty crime in New York, and quickly takes up similar work in the homeland he left when he was four. Everton St. Clair (Stephan James) is a naive, collegeaged Londoner.
Some of these deportees make softer landings than others, but all have their problems. Not least, they all wind up in the crime-ridden Kingston neighbourhoods of Greenwich Town and Trench Town (ably played by Trinidad), about as far from the tourist images of Jamaica as one can imagine.
Marva lodges with her uncle, whose concept of “paying rent” is disturbingly corporal. Worse, no one will hire a known deportee, on the not-unreasonable assumption that you must have done something pretty unsavoury to get sent back. Thus Dunston becomes a hired gun for a local gangster, while Everton quickly runs out of money and is forced to live on the street, where he starts to resemble Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
Sutherland wrote the script for Home Again with his wife and coproducer Jennifer Holness, based on information for what was originally conceived as a documentary on the subject. The tripartite nature of the film means that some sections flow better than others, while an attempt to bring all three threads together strikes me as a narrative misstep.
Dunston’s story is easily the strongest and most nuanced. He has a brother (Canadian Richard Chevolleau; born in Jamaica, raised in Toronto) who gets him work in a gang, where he falls for a cook (Fefe Dobson) and, through her brother, dabbles in the Rastafari movement.
In one of the film’s lighter moments, Dunston’s face lights up as he encounters religion-with-a-bong. Sutherland also gets creative with his subtitles (much of the film is in Jamaican slang and patois), which sometimes flitter and float with a life of their own.
The film’s thematic foundation also becomes its biggest weakness. One can feel the plot fighting with the filmmaker’s need to stay on message. But the message, though never disguised, isn’t heavy-handed either. Marva is perhaps least guilty of the trio, but none of the characters are angels. They are simply caught in a cog that Western governments may wish to examine before it catches more people in its indifferent teeth. ΣΣΣ