Glover lends urgency when story falters
Danny Glover is most famous for being exasperated with Mel Gibson — and welcome to that club — in the Lethal Weapon movies, but on his own, he’s an actor with an earthy command. In Donovan’s Echo, a first film by B.C. director Jim Cliffe, Glover plays Donovan, an aging mathematician who returns to his hometown shouldering a lifetime of regrets, as well as a quiet alcoholism, on the 30th anniversary of the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident.
Donovan has a complicated background and not always a persuasive one, but Glover gives it a kind of magisterial heaviness.
Donovan’s Echo is set in 1994, but it also hearkens back to 1964, the year Donovan’s family died. He keeps running into reminders that make him wonder if he is repeating history. He seems to know what’s going to happen, and if he can stop it, maybe he will have repaid his debt.
Further premonitions also haunt him, most of them dismissed by Finnley (Bruce Greenwood), his brother-in-law who becomes exasperated with Donovan’s visions.
The screenplay by Cliffe and Melodie Krieger provides several hints that verge on the clunky, so we never buy the ambiguity that might have made this story a more interesting examination of self-forgiveness.
Still, Donovan’s Echo keeps you watching, if only to see Glover’s rising desperation seem both invented and urgent. Even if we don’t always buy the story, we buy him.