Close To You Review Elliot Page Anchors Wellintentioned Yet Patchy Drama
Dominic Savage's work tends to focus on people, usually women, who face challenges that impact their daily lives, are concrete and stressful, and never entirely believable. She acknowledged Gemma Arterton's best performance in the 2017 Toronto premiere of "The Escape," where she played a deeply troubled woman who wants to escape her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Her Channel 4 anthology series, I Am..., features a range of characters at a crossroads, from devastated Vicky McClure, who struggles with psychological abuse suffered by her partner, to recent Bafta winner Kate Winslet, whose mother struggles with social relations with a daughter. who was disabled due to internet addiction. His penchant for often banal naturalism, largely improvised dialogue, resulted in ineffably informed performances and unusually instinctive decisions from stars often unaccustomed to such freedom.
His Midas touch now comes courtesy of Elliott Page, a once-ubiquitous actor in films like “Juno,” “Inception,” “Hard Candy” and Drew Barrymore's sadly under-appreciated, but has never appeared on the big screen. since 2017 you can see the screen. Off-Screen Transitions stars in the Netflix fantasy series Umbrella Academy, one of the network's biggest hits, but otherwise we rarely see him as an adult actor. Another form of catharsis came with the publication of Pageboy's memoirs, which give us insight into a Page we didn't really know at the height of his fame. Canadian drama Close to You, filmed in relative secret earlier this year, is based on a story co-created by Savage and Page, but contains a lot of improvisation, for better or worse.
Paige plays Sam, a man living in Toronto who is preparing for a trip he doesn't really want to take. It's her father's birthday and he's back for the first time in four years, the first time he's been home since his death. Just as he feels accepted and finds the peace he previously thought was unattainable in his new life, a trip back to his small hometown takes a toll, and when he meets an old high school friend (Hilary Baak, star of “The Ost” by Page . He is torn between the good and bad memories of his youth. Like Sam, the film is torn between the tensions of his childhood home and the return of the love story of the person who left him—a balance that is difficult to perfect. As complete as Sam's scenes at home are, where he being himself in a place and dynamic he's never allowed himself to be in, his scenes with his old friends are equally hollow due to their limited chemistry, meandering dialogue, and over-reliance on an overarching story we're too stupid to care about .
Relying on actors to improvise much of their own dialogue is a risk that may have paid off for Savage in the past, and in a few scenes here it certainly pays off, but otherwise it really doesn't. While some of the actors, especially Page, manage to make the process look easy, others seem to struggle, making it seem like a realistic drama, more like an actors' workshop. Page's familiarity with the material creates some of the most powerful scenes in the film, and he understands the fear that many LGBTQ+ people feel toward their kin, no matter how kind and liberal they may be (the film avoids polite confrontations with right-wing kin). . . ) and in situations where there is no pleasant contact that makes you feel less like a stranger. There's a small, awkward moment where he tries to gently advise his loved one in a much more difficult situation for him, before it all finally explodes in a scene that seems too far-fetched to believe. The dialogue goes from bland to boring and suddenly the film focuses entirely on Sam's doomed love story and limps to the end.
There are interesting characters here on a very interesting journey, and perhaps condensed into a more forgiving one-hour format, "Savage, I Am..." could have been something tighter and more effective. But as a film, Close to You feels too obscure, a major triumph and welcome return for Page, who still misses opportunities.
