THEY WILL SURVIVE
Kathleen Hepburn’s debut about damaged people struggling to get by
When Vancouver filmmaker Kathleen Hepburn won the most promising director of a Canadian short film prize at the 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival, she apparently took it to heart. Never Steady, Never Still, her feature debut, is an expanded version of her 18-minute short of the same name.
Shirley Henderson stars as Judy, a woman dealing with the advance of Parkinson’s disease while living in a remote community on the B.C. coast. Her 18-year-old son Jamie (Théodore Pellerin) is physically hale but emotionally fragile. One of the film’s lighter moments comes when Jamie applies to work on an oil-drilling rig. “Where do see
yourself in five years?” asks the foreman, when it’s clear the kid doesn’t know where he’s going five minutes after the interview. There’s also Mary Galloway as a grocery-store clerk who proves to be a helpful contact for both mother and son.
Hepburn paints a sympathetic portrait of damaged men and women struggling to get by, uncertain if they’ve got what it takes. “Not a strong man,” says Judy’s friend, explaining why he missed someone’s funeral. And Jamie, in one of the occasional voice-overs that sound like poetry, remembers letting go of his dog when his dad was pulling out porcupine quills. He couldn’t stand hearing its cries, but when he released his hold, the dog ran off and never came back.
The movie was shot in B.C. and makes the most of its natural scenery, and of the slow progress of seasons. The changeable weather certainly fits with the film’s enigmatic title, which also sounds like it could have come from an Emily Dickinson poem.
“If you’re better than this place,” comes another bit of voice-over, “then why is this place so hard?” You’ll root for Hepburn’s characters to lift themselves out of troubled places, and with good reason; they’re stronger than they at first seem, and more resilient than they give themselves credit for.