There are two main types of stories about smalltown people finding themselves: ones where they move away from the suffocating place where they grew up, and ones where they come back. \u201cClose to You\u201d is the second kind of movie. Written and directed by Dominic Savage, starring Elliott Page in his first lead performance as a trans man, and based on a story that Page co-wrote,\u00a0it\u2019s about a trans man going home to the small town where he grew up to visit his family after four years of finding himself in a big city. It\u2019s raw and often powerful\u2014less of a carefully shaped drama than the equivalent of a series of boxes filled with explosive material being slung about. It\u2019s less concerned with winning points for neatness than in letting scenes unfold in an unflinchingly immediate way. Sometimes it hurts, and it\u2019s supposed to.<\/p>\n
Page\u2019s character, Sam, leaves the small flat in Toronto that he shares with a roommate and takes a train back to his hometown near Lake Ontario because his dad Jim (Peter Outerbridge) is having a birthday party. Jim is happy to see Sam, calls him \u201cson,\u201d and is generally warmer and supportive than you might have anticipated given Sam\u2019s dread. Sam\u2019s mom Miriam (Wendy Crewson) is overcome with emotion at having Sam back in the house but also afflicted by attacks of guilt and shame over having failed him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sam\u2019s sisters Kate (Janet Porter) and Megan (Alex Paxton-Beesley) and brother Michael (Daniel Maslany) are also supportive. But there are moments where their theoretically sensitive questions and chit-chat have a passive-aggressive undertone, or perhaps a sense that they\u2019re trying too hard or overcompensating. It\u2019s a performance of liberalism or \u201ctolerance\u201d whose primary audience is themselves, not Sam. (There may also be an unexamined defensiveness on the part of the sisters for having stayed put and embraced a classic heteronormative smalltown lifestyle rather than going off to the big city like Sam to take risks and have adventures.) Some of Page\u2019s most eloquent and multilayered close-ups capture that grin-and-bear-it double-bind that people in Sam\u2019s situation find themselves in, where it\u2019s not appropriate to jump on another person for failing to react in precisely the correct way at every given millisecond because they are only human, and, in their own minds at least, they mean well. Whatever the flaws, their behavior is preferable to the alternative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The alternative\u2014at least a nonviolent version of it\u2014is represented by Sam\u2019s brother-in-law Paul (David Reale). He seems to think he\u2019s being curious and welcoming and \u201cjust asking questions\u201d to understand things, but he comes across as a resentful, fearful person. There\u2019s an angry undertone to his attempts at connection. He behaves as if the mere presence of Sam is an accusation of bigotry against him. He\u2019s obsessed with how Sam\u2019s identifying as a man forces the rest of \u201cthem\u201d (mainly him) to change and adapt\u2014as if it were fair to ask Sam to perform femininity under an old name so that Paul would feel comfortable? Is that what Paul wants? It\u2019s hard to say, and Paul probably doesn\u2019t know either.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are two main types of stories about smalltown people finding themselves: ones where they move away from the suffocating place where they grew up, and ones where they come back. \u201cClose to You\u201d is the second kind of movie. Written and directed by Dominic Savage, starring Elliott Page in his first lead performance as …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[45,39],"class_list":["post-1502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama-movies","tag-drama","tag-romance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}