Haunting doc examines how hero ends up homeless

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This article was published 15/01/2016 (3859 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Maybe you’ve never heard of Steve Fonyo. Or maybe you haven’t thought of him for a while. This new documentary by Toronto filmmaker Alan Zweig will change that, with its melancholy, moving look at the cross-Canada marathoner whose early celebrity slumped into petty crime, poverty and addiction. Starting as a deeply sad character study, the film becomes a deeper investigation of identity, fame and failure.

“What’s a hero’s life?’ Fonyo asks plaintively at one point. Hurt, which won the inaugural Platform Prize at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, grapples with that question.

Fonyo lost a leg to cancer at age 12. In 1984, as an 18-year-old, he started the cross-country run Terry Fox had not been able to complete, beginning in St. John’s, N.L., and hitting the Prairies as frigid winter set in. On May 29, 1985, Fonyo dipped his prosthetic foot in the Pacific Ocean.

Despite initial acclaim — there are photo ops with small-town beauty queens and cheering schoolchildren — the sometimes awkward and abrasive Fonyo seemed slated to live in the shadow of the beloved Fox. He was often dismissed as a copycat — the “second one-legged runner’ — rather than acknowledged for his toughness and tenacity.

By the time Zweig (When Jews Were Funny) catches up with Fonyo, he’s doing crack cocaine, stealing car parts and occasionally landing in jail. He and his wife, Lisa, have endured bouts of homelessness on the mean streets of Vancouver.

Zweig’s camera explores Fonyo’s sketchy neighbourhood in Surrey, B.C., with its rundown houses, derelict cars, toothless meth addicts, wary pit bulls and on-camera fist fights. The film seems to drift dangerously close to reality-TV freak show, but Zweig counters this tendency with his empathetic, on-the-ground approach to Fonyo and his troubles.

In Zweig’s Mirror Trilogy, which includes his breakthrough film, Vinyl (2000), I, Curmudgeon (2004) and Lovable (2007), he inserted himself into his work, sharing in the problems of his subjects with naked, needy honesty.

This personal approach to filmmaking turned outward in the Genie Award-winning A Hard Name (2009), about ex-convicts trying to reintegrate into society. In Hurt, Zweig remains out of frame but is present as a grumbly interrogative voice. Zweig meets with Fonyo four times over the course of a year, sometimes acting as a driver (he shuttles Fonyo to court appearances and Canadian Tire), sometimes as a therapist or social worker.

The relationship between documentarian and subject has been raising tricky emotional and ethical questions since Nanook of the North (1922). Zweig likes to get things out into the open. This is not so much fly-on-the-wall filmmaking as fly-in-the-ointment filmmaking.

Zweig keeps nudging Fonyo toward self-analysis, trying to break him out of deceptive and self-defeating patterns of thought. At one point, he arranges a counselling session with addiction specialist Gabor Maté.

Zweig and Fonyo’s dynamic is testy and unpredictable but it doesn’t feel exploitative. Fonyo’s situation spans some extremes, from early adulation to middle-aged destitution, but Zweig frames it as a common human problem. Fonyo is a man who finds himself bewildered by the course of his own life.

“He can’t figure out why he’s not doing better,’ explains his wife. “And it’s driving him nuts.’

“Everybody wants a happy ending for a story,’ Fonyo says, as he looks back on his fame and its unexpected aftermath. Hurt concludes abruptly with yellow police tape and ominous news footage, but this haunting documentary also holds out muted hope Fonyo might rediscover the resilience that made him, briefly, a household name.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

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