The Englishman's Boy

John N. Smith – 2008 – Canada

This two-part film for Canadian television tells the story of the young servant of an English traveler who, when his master dies, hooks up with a gang of cowboys crossing the wilderness in search of cattle to herd.  The boy’s eyes are opened by the hardened cruelty of some of the men he finds himself riding with across the plain.  Meanwhile, in a series of flash-forwards 50 years into the future, the same boy, now known as ‘Shorty’ is depicted as an elderly stunt man in 1920s Hollywood.  ‘Shorty’ relays a tragic story that culminates in the massacre of a Native American tribe and the kidnapping, rape and murder of an Indian girl; a story that studio mogul Bob Hoskins plans to turn into a movie that will offensively re-write history by making the criminals into heroes.  The Englishman’s Boy is based on a somewhat famous book of the same name and it suffers badly from its obvious and labored reverence for every episode, character and subplot in the novel, a problem only exacerbated by the fact that novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe wrote the screenplay himself – a situation that has almost never resulted in a good film to my knowledge; (technically faithful adaptations, yes, but rarely good films*).  The periodic shifts back and forth in time are nearly disastrous to the narrative, furthermore.  We never feel a meditatively meaningful transition that the producers presumably hoped for, as we do with the essentially same technique used by Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather, Part II.  Instead, these moments irritatingly spoil the momentum of each era’s story just when we’re getting involved.  It seems obvious that these time changes occur when they do for no other reason than because that’s where they are in the book.  In such cases, a strong director (rather than an artless journeyman) is needed to insist that the structure of the film needs to work cinematically more than literarily.  Aside from the admirable historical accuracy and high production values, what literally rescues the film from the jaws of defeat are two fine performances in the lead role; Michael Eisner as ‘the boy’ and Nicholas Campbell – (veteran of several Cronenberg films, notably) – as his older version, ‘Shorty.’  Eisner, in particular, is exceptional in portraying the young man’s curious mix of impertinence and naiveté.  He seems fearless in his willingness to enact the part of a hero who is not eloquent, terribly agile or even very heroic; most actors would find that objectionable and frustrating.  The sobering contrast between Eisner’s affable goofiness and Campbell’s embittered, laconic cynicism is really the only thing that gives the film any dramatic punch, but unfortunately the other elements – i.e. the writing, direction and editing – fail to pull the same weight, which more-or-less leaves the actors twisting in the wind.  From strictly a filmmaking standpoint, I would’ve scrapped the whole ‘Shorty’ in Hollywood part of the story and focused entirely on the much stronger tale of ‘the boy’ and his traumatic adventures, which works perfectly well as a frontier drama told in the present tense.  To reference Coppola yet again, a real auteur must be arrogant enough to prune away elements of a novel that simply don’t work, as he did in mercilessly dumping huge, crucial chunks from a trashy best-seller called The Godfather in order to use some of its plot as the basis for one of the greatest films ever made.

*Graham Greene and Rumer Godden adapting their novels The Fallen Idol and The River, respectively, come to mind as obvious exceptions to this rule.