Trevor Anderson | The Man That Got Away / 2012

good luck

by Douglas Messerli

 

Trevor Anderson (screenwriter and director) The Man That Got Away / 2012 [25 minutes]

 

Whatever do the Canadians put in that maple syrup for which they’re so very famous? Perhaps all would-be experimental and gay Canadian filmmakers are required to first study the great Canadian mad surrealist dramatist and sound poet Claude Gauvreau. How else to explain the existence of John Greyson, Patricia Rozema, Mike Hoolboom, Nik Sheehan, Lèa Pool, Xavier Dolan, Chelsea McMullan, Wrik Mead, Guy Maddin, Trevor Anderson, and many other gay and lesbian filmmakers who seem so far more free-wheeling than their US counterparts?

      Greyson, Mead, Maddin (not gay, but who is receptive to gay themes), Sheehan, Anderson, Hoolboom, and several others, in particular, love to combine various genres—documentary, musical comedy, noir drama, gay politics, biography, opera, and family history—into a single film in a manner that I’ve noticed elsewhere only in New Zealand. Certainly, there ought to be a serious study of this manifestation. If nothing else, it proves that all these Canadians read their Northrup Frye.

      I was absolutely delighted, accordingly, to discover the other day Trevor Anderson’s The Man That Got Away, a documentary about Trevor’s great-uncle Jimmy that explored its subject primarily through the tropes of musical comedy (music by Bruce Kulak, lyrics by Anderson) and dance played out in a spiral parking garage. I couldn’t have asked for a better Sunday afternoon entertainment.

 

     Jimmy, Trevor tells us, grew up on a farm in the Canadian prairie in the Alberta Rosebud Valley during the Great Depression. Unlike his brothers who were natural mechanics and outfield baseball players, Jimmy was Georgie Kemp’s star pupil in tap dance. All of which occasions a delightful musical number with a child version of Jimmy (Aryn McConnell) singing and dancing with his mechanic and baseball-playing brothers (Mat Busy, Matthew Lindholm, Ryde McLenon, and Jason Morris) the memorable number: “I gotta get the frick / out this god damn craphole / before I lose my frigging mind.”              

     By the time World War II came along, Jimmy (Bryce Kulak) had joined the Merchant Marines, and went off with his new sailor mates in matching outfits to shower with his friends (Jason Hardwick and Eric Wigston), with whom he sings, “Let no one back home doubt this, we give a helping hand…,” “We’ll man each-other’s stations, our flags will fly erect.”  It’s their “do-wattin, dootilywatten duty to leave home.”

 

      Jimmy survives the war and, inevitably ends up on a Broadway chorus line, the musical forgotten evidently by family members. What the family does know is that New York “was an afterhours club with no last call.” Jimmy sings about becoming addicted, not only to his nightlife friends (Matthew Akplu, Ambeer Borostik, Jamie Cavanagh, Nicola Elbro, Peter Ferandes, Kristine Nutting, Kristen Padavs, Jeff Rivet, and Melissa Thingelstad), but to the booze and pills.

      Tired of his empty life, Jimmy checks himself into an institution to get the “fresh start,” of which the doctors and nurses (Clinton Carew, Kendra Connor, Tom Edwards, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, and Amy van Keeken) sing, a song suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a new clinic guest also seeking to get clear of drugs. You guessed it, Judy Garland (nicely performed by Connie Champagne), who arrives in her chauffeured car, singing “It really is a pleasure to meet me,” as she pleasantly greets her “loyal strangers,” with whom her visions of “myself” don’t really rhyme.

     Who else can she buddy up but the male chorus member, right? Immediately they hit it off with “Old blood,” a song which testifies to their perverse life styles which put them in the “nut house.”

 

Judy writes a note to Jimmy and signs it with a kiss which he keeps in his billfold for the rest of his life.

       “Cured,” Jimmy returns home where he joins a construction crew, “up north,” building roads where, as he sings, he’s “bluffin’ and shufflin’ through feeling nothin’.”

        Jimmy starts “using” again, writes some bad checks, and does time in the Drumheller Penitentiary, located ironically near the town best known as dinosaur heaven. “I’m longing for a party, I’m longing for a spree, and no one longs for me.”

        Freed from prison, Jimmy returns to Vancouver, where he shipped as a sailor. But the dance this Jimmy (Noam Gagnon) plays out makes Gene Kelly’s melancholy “A Day in New York” in On the Town (1949) seem like cakewalk. Drugged out of his mind, Gagnon takes his Jimmy up against the wall and almost over the barrier as he agonizingly suffers the silent dance of death.

 

     Anderson adds an odd afterthought almost in lieu of an obituary outside of the movie he’s made: “If a man dies on the street, somebody goes through his wallet, a cop, a nurse, some thief. You find a note, a note from Judy Garland. You don’t throw that away. You keep it. Or you sell it. Where’s that note, today?”

     That note apparently read: “Dear Jimmy, Good luck on the outside. Love, Judy Garland.”

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).