Rural Ontario gets an epic soundtrack in Ed Gass-Donnelly's hybrid of police procedural and inky character study. Capturing the Bruce Peninsula area, the Mennonite-heavy area north of Waterloo with apocalyptic gospel noodling of musical collective named fittingly, The Bruce Peninsula, Small Town Murder Songs essays the local police and provincial police response to the first murder in Greyforks, Ontario. A dancer at the local peeler bar is found with her underwear at her ankles in a picturesque-by-being-not-picturesque ditch along the side of a highway. The local police captain is played by prolific Swedish character actor Peter Stormare sporting a spectacular Cop-moustache, which is boldly jet black. Captain Walter is shown in slow motion tableux in the opening shot of the film looking guilty of something as bystanders look on with bafflement and judgement, and the film quickly cuts to an adult baptism in the next shot making a clear violence/redemption theme that will penetrate much of the story. Throw some fire and brimstone bible quotations in the Chapter styled title cards, and the Canadian gothic backdrop and you can guess that you are in for a look into the fragile headspace of a police officer with a past. Stormore is completely up to the challenge of dropping the supporting character role (of his hundred odd film credits) to make for a very credible and interesting leading man slash anti-hero.
The film has a lot of things on its plate. One might make the argument that these asides exist in part to flesh out the runtime of the film. The central crime is actually no great or particularly revealing mystery (keeping with the realism espoused by one of the personalities of the film) and is solved with the clipped efficiency of Washington, the out of town homicide investigator, and the door to door (to a of a few of the seedier establishments with innocent frontage) footwork of Walter and his deputy (Aaron Poole, very solid) who gets more work done simply by identifying who played the anonymous 911 call from its recording. This leaves a lot of margins for Gass-Donnelly to fill in with a music video aesthetic, and I mean this in a good way. The use of slow motion wide-screen photography and thundering gospel gives Small Town Murder Songs a very distinct style, while still being a grounded and real look at the region that offer poetry in the mundane, and really show off just how darn level that part of Ontario is. Law and Order's Jill Hennessey and wonderfully down to earth (if not exceptionally bright) Martha Plimpton play the two women in Walter's life which contrast where he was then and where he is now. Hennessey's Whiskey Tango Ex- factors heavily in the murder case, Plimpton's far more conservative (shown having sex Missionary, and praying with Walt in his down time) diner waitress affords the film to have one of three tonal digressions into 'what the town thinks' of this gristly murder. A diner conversation with a busy-body partron is reminiscent of Maury Chaykin's grotesque innkeep in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter; a film that shares a few similarities to this one, even though it takes place in a small town in Western Canada. Another digression features prolific Canadian character actor Jackie Burroughs is a wonderfully warm and genuine performance that doesn't really need to be in the movie, but it makes you glad it is there, especially as it affords the films closing Tableaux (which oddly recalls the Gary Jules musical side-pan at the end of Donnie Darko.)
My biggest complaint about Small Town Murder Songs is that it is not long enough. Spending screen-time to establishing the community, the German farmers (of whom Walter is directly related, if ostracized from), the rhythm of the region (a scene involving the moving of a bungalow-styled home by flatbed truck is a veritable show-stopper) to intermingle with Walters own sense of inner conflict and alienation is excellent, but the film is onto something that could have gone a lot further. Brendan Steacy's cinematography lets the viewer do a lot of the work tying image and tone to the themes outlayed by Gass-Donnelly, I'm not saying I wanted them to be too overt or heavy handed, just explore this region a little more.
Small Town Murder Songs opens in Toronto (at The Royal) on February 18th, 2011.