Cole

 (Canada)

By JOHN ANDERSON

A Rampart Films and Titlecard Pictures presentation in association with Ravenwest Films and Resonance Films. (Sales: the Film Sales Co., New York.) Produced by Dylan Thomas Collingwood, Kimani Ray Smith, Jason James. Executive producer, Irene Nelson. Co-producer, Carl Bessai. Directed by Carl Bessai. Screenplay, Adam Zang.
 
With: Richard de Klerk, Kandyse McClure, Sonja Bennett, Chad Willett, Michael Eisner, Jack Forrester, Rebecca Jenkins.
 

Mistaking poverty for profundity and ugliness for drama, Carl Bessai's small-caliber "Cole" tells a familiar story about a poor boy trying to make good. But the boy doesn't have much purpose, and neither does the movie. Veteran helmer Bessai has a good eye for the day-to-day detail of low-rent Canadian life, but lackluster perfs and a meandering storyline will relegate "Cole" to the margins of cable.

The film boasts a near-Dickensian cast of characters, ranging from the would-be writer of the title (Richard de Klerk) to his demented mother (Rebecca Jenkins), who is always wandering out of the house and into the road. Luckily, their hometown of Lytton, B.C., is the kind of place where you'd have to plan ahead to get hit by a car -- which doesn't do much for business at the family gas station run by Cole's beautiful but bad-tempered sister Maybelline (Sonja Bennett).

Maybelline has two kids -- Rocket (Jack Forrester), the mixed-race result of a bygone relationship, and a baby by her abusive boyfriend, Bobby (Chad Willett), who doesn't like Rocket, or Cole, or even Maybelline, really, and whose thwarted dream is to build a car wash. These people make Faulkner's Snopes family seem like the Windsors.

That Cole wants to go to the local university (which is three hours away) to study creative writing seems like the height of pretention, but he goes, and meets the rich, beautiful and slightly clueless Serafina (Kandyse McClure), who thinks it's a good move to correct the professor's diction on the first day of class. This lets us know that, although Serafina is black, she's still a snotty, entitled nimrod who can somehow see the stud-muffin potential in awkward, shuffling Cole, who consistently approaches life by backing into it. There's simply no chemistry between Cole and Serafina, a fact from which Bessai tries to distract the viewer by making the camera do every crazy thing possible except frame a scene properly.

Drama needs conflict, but what Bessai offers mostly is tension. One waits all through the movie for Cole to do something about Bobby (Willett is a convincingly nasty example of the Angry White Guy), whose behavior is beyond reprehensible, and it's significant that what pushes Cole over the edge isn't Bobby's treatment of his sister, but of her son. What Adam Zang's script is really about, although no one involved seems to know it, is domestic abuse: Just as the movie gives the issue secondary status, so do the people in the film.

Bobby beats Maybelline frequently and terrorizes her constantly, but what "Cole" is concerned with primarily is its hero's escape into art. What's the moral? That the male should summon the courage to leave his sister, her children and his demented mother behind as he pursues his muse. Inadvertently, Bessai has created a feminist fable, and a very unhappy one.

Production values are mediocre.

Camera (color), Bessai; editor, Mark Shearer; music, Clinton Shorter; production designer, Dina Holmes; costume designers, Kerry Weinrauch, Joi Kittredge; casting, Melissa Perry, Larkin MacKenzie-Ast. Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Contemporary World Cinema), Sept. 14, 2009. Running time: 95 MIN.