C.R.A.Z.Y.

(Jean-Marc Vallée, Canada)

The various successes of C.R.A.Z.Y.—a Québecois smash that deals with real things and attracts people who don’t ordinarily go to movies (something essential for a long shelf life)—put it in a heavyweight classification somewhere between Titanic (1997) and Mambo Italiano (2003). It’s about family, to which everyone can relate. And if you don’t see the outcome looming, like an iceberg with “ICEBERG” written on its side, you might have been surprised when the ship sank, too.

But it’s sweet. It’s redemptive. It made $6 million in Québec alone and is the Canadian nominee for Oscar’s Best Foreign Film. Yes, it has English subtitles for the non-Québec audiences, ordinarily the kiss of death in that large movie market south of Winnipeg , but it could overcome. It makes one feel good about one’s own open-mindedness. It wants to say that blood is thicker than water, when it’s really thicker than 90-weight oil and is oftentimes just as appealing. The soundtrack is a drive down Memory Lane for the middle-aged, and is less subtle than a John Williams score. And the movie practices a slick form of sleight of hand.

The wild success of a predictably popular movie like C.R.A.Z.Y.—and it is predictable, sadly enough—represents not a revisionist past, but a revisionist present. It is made by what has become a tried-and-true technique: take an issue, in this case homophobia, and view it through a prism of, say, 30 years. What do you get? “Oh,” thinks C.R.A.Z.Y.’s audience, “weren’t people ignorant?” When? Today at lunch? Right, you mean way back then. Before we all came to understand each other and live in peace, tolerance, and domestic tranquility.

It’s a standard ruse, one based on sociological cowardice. Tackle a controversy, yes, but place it somewhere safely in history where it can be viewed as if through glass. It’s an approach we’ve seen in dozens of movies over the last dozen years or so, ones as disparate as the recent Disney product The Greatest Game Ever Played—in which cruel class distinctions are treated as some extinct monster, rather than the ethos by which certain governments operate—and Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), which, for all its greatness, behaves (yes, OK, ironically) as if racism was something we’d cured, like polio, sometime in the 50s. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain , which I thought was a heartbreaking work, practices the same hoodoo. Imagine if it were not set in the 60s, when gays could be martyred by Wyoming yahoos just for being gay. (Wait a minute: Where was The Laramie Project set?) Presumably, the impossible romance between Lee’s gay lovers, were it to take place now, could have been easily worked out. But given the landscape and circumstance and the Defense of Marriage Act, we’re not so sure.

Not to give Mel Gibson any more credit that he’s not earned already, but what he did in The Passion of the Christ (2004) was take a crucifixion out of a muddled, romanticized, gauzy past and put it in your face as if it were an underdone, badly abused pork chop. What movies like Brokeback Mountain and C.R.A.Z.Y. do is ask us to embrace an issue while keeping it safely at arms’ length.

C.R.A.Z.Y. director Jean-Marc Vallée (who said before a screening at the recent Vancouver International Film Festival that his little film had enjoyed a $600,000 music budget) approaches gayness as if with tongs: nothing sloppy, nothing graphic—nothing, in other words, to put off an audience that might not quite be ready for the messy realities of what is, for the movie’s featured family, a distinctly alternative lifestyle. For Zach (Marc-André Grondin), the fourth of five sons born to the charming, aging, homophobic hipster Gervais (played wonderfully by Michel Côté), bias isn’t some artifact of an ancient civilization, but an ongoing crisis. In one of Vallée’s cuter moments, Zach actually hides in the closet, observing the seemingly hourly heterosexual conquests of his rebellious older brother Ray (Pierre-Luc Brillant). When Zach comes out—literally, not figuratively—he gets a punch in the face. But his sexual emergence is so late in coming, his character so conflicted rather than decidedly queer, that the filmmaker ends up making a big fat sitcom out of a serious social crisis.

Lest we get distracted by all the low-rent domestic comedy, classic rock, and contrived anguish, C.R.A.Z.Y. has some good performances, notably by Côté, even if his character’s homophobia doesn’t quite reconcile with the out-there characteristics that make him so charming, and ultimately so awful. The straight Gervais has some curious fetishes: a penchant for Patsy Cline, for his cool black Cutlass, and for singing along, quite unabashedly, with Charles Aznavour records at the climax of family functions. He is not a Homer Simpson-esque dope; he follows fashion, however badly (Côté’s haircuts are hilarious). He obviously knows what’s going on in the world outside Québec. He is the kind of man who might expect—as Irish mothers once did, vis-à-vis the priesthood— to offer up one son to homosexuality. God knows, with five sons, the odds are that he’d have no choice. But he never understands Zach, and he never really tries.

Just as Côté dominates the cast, his character’s bias dominates the movie’s ethos and, like so much else, this feels forced (as does much else in a movie so dominated by a soundtrack featuring, among others, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones). But let’s face it: does anyone in this movie seem to be related to anyone else? The brothers—the title of the film is an acronym of their names (Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zachary, and Yvan)—aren’t just a diverse group, with each Central Casting slot occupied (jock, brain, drug addict, homo, acerbic fat loser). They’re from different planets. They don’t look alike. They don’t share any similarities. And although their variety might be a statement about Zach’s right to be who he is (no one else is bothered about who he is), people in families do, in fact, sound alike, walk alike and share an exposure to the same ideas which manifest themselves somehow, if not necessarily in enthusiastic agreement.

But if you’re looking for cinéma vérité, or even plausible fiction filmmaking, you’re not going to be cuckoo for C.R.A.Z.Y. Does it work on any level? Sure, but likely not for people who really care about the issues raised, because the issues raised are used as devices. Why does it take Zach most of the movie to even accept that he’s gay? Because then he can have a heterosexual relationship for most of the movie with the rather less-than-perceptive redhead who loves him. (Honey, anyone that much into Bowie has got issues). She is a bit butch, though. Maybe in C.R.A.Z.I.E.R.?

—John Anderson

C.R.A.Z.Y.

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