When the home team really lets you down
Hello Destroyer
(out of 4) Starring Jared Abrahamson, Kurt Max Runte, Joe Dion Buffalo, Paul McGillion and Sara Canning. Written and directed by Kevan Funk. Opens Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 110 minutes. 14A The tragic cliché of the heroic hockey enforcer is explored with art and impact in this powerful feature debut by Vancouver writer/director Kevan Funk.
Nominated for four Candys at this week’s Canadian Screen Awards, Best Motion Picture among them, Hello Destroyer brings documentary realism to the dramatic story of minor league bruiser Tyson Burr (Jared Abrahamson).
As a new recruit to the Prince George Warriors, Tyson is eager to please his meat-eating coach Dale Milbury (Kurt Max Runte), who counsels winning at all costs: “This is why we burn and bleed — to achieve greatness.” But when Tyson’s exuberance sends an opposing player to hospital with life-altering brain and spine injuries, the coach and other team officials shift from high-fiving to fingerpointing. Tyson is put on “indefinite suspension” while lawyers shimmy.
“Indefinite” translates as the ostracizing of dazed Tyson, who is as inarticulate as he is ill-equipped to deal with public shunning. Abrahamson manifests his character’s grief with almost wordless self-loathing and a barely contained rage that recalls Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea.
Funk doesn’t stint on the loaded metaphors. Tyson spends his days in the wilderness working at an abbatoir and tearing down an old house, his interior torment underlined by cinematographer Benjamin Loeb’s artfully claustrophobic close-ups. The one person who befriends Tyson is an indigenous man (Joe Dion Buffalo), who understands social disenfranchisement all too well.
It’s all legit, though, considering the circumstances. And Funk is equally capable of critical understatement, as when the concept of “home” turns hypocritical in scenes set before and after Tyson’s fall from grace.
Players are told by their coach that they have to loyally beat up the visiting opposing team because “It’s our house, for f---’s sake.” The fans expect it.
But when it all goes terribly wrong, remorseful Tyson is asked by the worried family billeting him to vacate the premises because “this is our home.” He might set a bad example to their young son, eh?
The film’s most powerful moment is completely inferred: a barely heard singing of “O Canada” at a televised hockey game seems sorrowful rather than triumphal.