In Sherry White’s directorial debut, Crackie, the
feature film’s main character, Mitsy, wears a red coat. But she does
more than just put it on for a few scenes: She recedes into it. The
winterwear envelops Mitsy, becoming part—an emblem—of the
character, played by Meaghan Greeley.
“That red jacket that she wears, which I loved, was a last-minute
thing,” says White, on the phone from Toronto. The St. John’s-based
actor, who also wrote Crackie, worked most of this past summer
in preparation for various festival screenings across the country
(Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver and Calgary, where it’s the opening
film).
“It just pops. It’s perfect for the colours of the film,” adds
White.
Afterwards, on the line from St. John’s, Charlotte Reid, the costume
designer on Crackie, recalls the coat. “It was bright red but it
was sad. It was so faded. We said it was [Mitsy’s] security blanket,”
says Reid, who also designs clothes for her own Charlotte Street
label.
While it carries a symbolic weight, the winterwear doesn’t outweigh
the other visual elements related to and set around Mitsy, the person
at the core of this story about a young woman’s uncertain, but
nonetheless determined, effort to end a family’s losing streak: A
legacy of women making mistakes that end up defining them and shaping
their lives. Mitsy lives with her grandmother, Bride (Mary Walsh). Both
her parents are gone—-her mom Gwennie (Cheryl Wells) away from
Newfoundland to Alberta for the hoped-for better life.
Mitsy decides to become a hairdresser and enrolls at a local
college. In one scene, she’s at the student loan office. “I remember
looking at her one time in that scene and she’s sitting there eating
that bag of chips and I could just watch her forever,” White says,
giggling. “And I finally started to laugh and said, ‘You really get my
sense of humour don’t you?’ There’s nothing about that scene that
should be funny, but she’s just sitting there and eating those chips
and she’s so curious, and looking around, and feeling uncomfortable and
nervous, and eatin’ her chips, and as she’s called up she takes a bite
of the chip and puts half the chip back in the bag.”
A theatre student at Grenfell College in Cornerbook, on the west
side of Newfoundland, Meghan Greeley delivered the essence of Mitsy
right there, says White. “And I just love that she got that. I wanted
that little moment. Because that’s one of the joys of life: eatin’ a
bag of chips. For a lot of people, that is the highlight of their day:
just eatin’ a bag of chips. That she was able to fill in that moment
and she didn’t rush through it…I actually have 10 minutes of her
eatin’ those chips just because I wouldn’t call cut because I was
havin’ so much fun watching her eat those chips.”
The string of giggles spools out into a full flight of laughter on
both ends of the line. Crackie scores many comedic points,
though the laughs emerge from a sense of discomfort and pain.
Not a stated comedy—though some festival programmers have referred
to it as a “dark comedy,” according to White—there’s a
simple, plaintive reason for the film. “That core desire for connection
is a big motivation for the story,” says White.
Mitsy tries to connect with her dog, a “crackie” or mutt, whom she
gets from local letch Duffy (Joel Hynes).
Several years ago, when off-screen couple Hynes and White were
having a child together, their work often had them apart. “I was
pregnant and he was away. I was alone with my dog, who wasn’t a great
dog,” recounts White. “I loved her very much but she just didn’t love
back. She was just interested in food and runnin’. I was the thing that
kept her from doing what she wanted to do.”
“I remember leaning under the bed trying to get the dog to come out
from under it to come and have a snuggle with me. The dogwas giving me
the blank stare and wanted nothing to do with me.”
It’s suggested that some pets, like some people, are just jerks.
“Yeah,” White says, feigning exasperation, “‘I’m trying to give you
some love there, asshole!”
The dog is a small but important thing White extracted from her life
for the film. Of course, the canine wants nothing to do with Mitsy,
despite her desparate attempts to build an affectionate bond between
them.
Similarly, another Newfoundland feature, Grown Up Movie
Star, explores the innate desire to connect to others and, through
that, to truly know and to accept others and oneself. A story sewn up
with humour and heaviness, too, it’s the first feature directed by
Adriana Maggs, actor, writer, best friend, co-creator (the awesome
Rabbittown, which aired a few years ago on CBC TV) and costar
(in that project and on another past CBC series, Mary Walsh’s
Hatching, Matching and Dispatching) to White.
Again, clothing helps make the character in Grown Up Movie
Star. “The fact that everyone was dressed really brightly and
really unusually against the really barren winter was important to me,”
says Maggs, who now lives in Toronto.
Maggs wanted her protagonist Ruby (another arguable breakout by a
young actor, Tatiana Maslany) to “stand out as a kind of misfit in the
town.” Ruby lives with her father Ray (Shawn Doyle), a former hockey
star who should have made all of Newfoundland proud, and her quiet but
observant sister Rose (another adept newcomer, Julia Kennedy).
An eccentric in demeanour and dress, Ruby piles on layers, so it
helped that the story takes place in winter. In terms of character, it
was a way to show how “she stands out as a kind of misfit in the town.”
Ruby combines, matches and mismatches pieces into cool and inventive
outfits.
“She’s pushing her limits, experimenting,” says Charlotte Reid, who
also worked as costume designer on Grown Up Movie Star, or
GUMS as she calls it for short. “Most of the stuff for
GUMS—half of Tatiana’s wardrobe—was from Value Village,”
Reid says, adding she accented with a “wristie” or scarf she designed
for her Charlotte Street label. (Mitsy’s red coat came from, Reid was
pretty sure, a vintage and secondhand shop in St. John’s called
Previously Loved.)
Of course, Ruby’s a kid, in her early-to mid-teens. Her choices,
whether in clothes or behaviour (flirting with an older man, a friend
of her father’s), reflect that. There’s a double entendre to the visual
cues of her clothes. She wears a coat with a fur collar and oversized
sunglasses, seemingly with style and ease: a confident kid. But at the
same time, she selects the outfit with the attendant childlike need for
attention and affection, from her preoccupied father and her absentee
mother (an aspiring but broken actor played by none other than Sherry
White, who takes off for LA early in the film). Ruby wears her mom’s
nightgown, which, Maggs points out, is a few sizes too big.
Ruby’s fashion-forward instinct and appearance and her kookiness
(freaking out the nice boy from Colorado, the non-glamourous part of
middle America) are mixed up with her dreams of notoriety and stardom.
The film moves forward on Ruby’s struggle to realize this is who she
is, not who she’s supposed to be to become famous, as she goes online
to build her image.
“I did want to acknowledge that we’re in that world right now,
without making a movie that was preachy about kids, celebrity and the
internet,” says Maggs. “Right now, we live in an intense celebrity
culture. We have so much access to what celebrities are doing. And with
reality TV you get the impression that it’s really easy to become a
celebrity.”
You don’t even need skills or talent. Ruby knows this, but not the
dangerous implications of it. “You just have to be noticed and flashy
and sexual and sexy,” says Maggs.
In preparing to play Ruby, Tatiana Maslany evaluated clothes like a
pro, recalls Reid. “When you meet the person and see how they’re going
to approach the character, that helps,” the costume designer says.
For her role as Mitsy’s grandmother in Crackie, Mary
Walsh worked closely with Reid on wardrobe, recalls White. “Mary Walsh
is very hands-on with what she wears,” she says. Her character, Bride,
is “every kind of woman.” She’s the tough nut wielding the axe to split
wood for the stove whose fists fly when Mitsy’s mom shows up back home
from Alberta. She’s the caretaker-grandma, standing in for the absentee
mom, and the sexual being—a distorted, disgraced version thereof, as
some in the town see it. “She’s kind of larger than life,” White says.
“We wanted to show that but not have it be ridiculous or over the
top.”
Bride was an “extremely complex” character for Reid to pin down. Not
only did the clothing have to reflect the layers of her character, Reid
points out, “They found all their clothes in the garbage.” Mitsy and
Bride live in a house neighbouring a dump.
Walsh, who also has a smaller, more subdued role in Grown Up
Movie Star, brings her usual intensity to Crackie, but she
cuts back the fierceness by adding a sense of unspoken—or
internalized—sadness and desperate hope in Mitsy, being the one to
break the chain of experience and events.
Maggs and White share a great respect for Walsh and, at the same
time, enthusiasm and excitement for the young stars of their films:
young women with tons of talent and heads on straight about the path
ahead.
Both on screen and off, one generation follows another.
Grown Up Movie Star
Sunday, September 20, 7pm, Park Lane 8
crackie
monday, september 21, 7:10pm, park lane 4
Tickets for both films, $9-$10
Tickets at Video Difference, AFF box office atlanticfilm.com, ticketpro.ca, 422-6965
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.