The strong, silent type

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This article was published 10/03/2017 (3517 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Screening this weekend at Cinematheque as part of Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival, writer-director Kevan Funk’s Hello Destroyer happens to appear a week before the opening of Jay Baruchel’s hockey comedy Goon: Last of the Enforcers.

It is impossible to imagine two more divergent takes stemming from the same theme: hockey violence.

The Goon sequel, of course, continues the comic adventures of Seann William Scott’s bouncer-turned-hockey enforcer Doug Glatt. It’s a movie that celebrates the values ascribed to Canada’s national sport: teamwork and sacrifice, consecrated by blood.

Hello Destroyer takes a polar opposite dramatic strategy, focusing ruthlessly on junior hockey player Tyson Burr (Jared Abrahamson).

Tyson gamely takes the punishment accorded a rookie, having his head shaved in the dressing room.

He takes it to heart when his coach bawls the team out for failing to play with enough passion during a losing streak. He promptly knocks out an opposing player during a scuffle. When that player fails to get up, Tyson is ejected from the game.

As it emerges that the injury is serious, Tyson is squeezed out from the safety of his hockey brotherhood. His own coach makes Tyson sign his name to a statement designed to protect the team from liability: “What happened Friday night was not at all reflective of the values or culture of the Prince George Warriors.”

It is, of course, a lie.

But it effectively puts Tyson in exile. He has to move back in with his parents, taking a job at the local slaughterhouse and helping dad out with the demolition of his dead grandfather’s deteriorating house on their property.

The tone of the film is very much in keeping with classic Canfilm: bleak, bleak, bleak.

But it’s admirable nonetheless. While this is a feature-length iteration of his 2013 short film, Destroyer, director Funk seems to have been inspired by László Nemes’s 2015 drama Son of Saul — yes, a Holocaust film, but one that stubbornly kept the camera trained on a single character as he descended Auschwitz’s circles of hell. So it is with Funk’s steadfast attention to Tyson, also a largely silent character enduring escalating levels of stress, while most other characters and events tend to stay out of focus.

In that crucial role, Flin Flon-born actor Abrahamson nails it. He may not have many lines, but he also never has a false moment. He breaks your heart with a macho stoicism that ultimately cannot withstand a relentless assault of callous indifference.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing