A faceoff with history

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This article was published 12/04/2018 (2760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An Indigenous boy coming from a shattered family life discovers he has a natural gift for hockey.

If Indian Horse was a conventional American sports movie, you could probably map out that logline into a boiler-plate plot of triumph over adversity. Throw in the love of a good woman and a climactic game, and it practically writes itself.

Indian Horse is not that movie. It’s not even close.

Based on the novel by Richard Wagamese, and largely inspired by the Ojibwe writer’s own private turmoils, this is a story of how even Canada’s game holds no dominion over Canada’s shame.

Adapted by screenwriter Dennis Foon and directed by Stephen Campanelli, the film begins with young Anishinaabe boy Saul Indian Horse (played as a child by Sladen Peltier) canoeing into the wilderness with his embattled parents, his grandmother and his sickly brother. It turns out to be an exercise in futility to prevent Saul being ripped from the family and sent to a brutal Catholic residential school, where, as Saul later discovers, actual education takes a back seat to systematically depriving Indigenous kids from their culture.

The facility’s supervisor Father Quinney (Michael Murphy) presents not as a monster but merely a hard-nosed disciplinarian. But as “discipline” includes literally putting children in a cage in the basement of the facility, the religious figures are little more than cruel functionaries, if not outright psychopaths.

An exception emerges in Father Gaston (Michiel Huisman), a padre given to rescuing some kids from the brutality of his more vicious associates. Father Gaston arranges for Saul to watch hockey games on television, serves as an assistant for the school team and ultimately put on skates to demonstrate his innate genius for the sport.

“The game loves you, son,” Gaston tells Saul.

Indeed, by the time he hits his teens (now played by Forrest Goodluck), Saul’s skill frees him from the school and into the home of a junior league coach (Michael Lawrenchuk), where he enjoys the semblance of a family life. Alas, by the time an NHL owner (Martin Donovan) comes calling to give the adult Saul (AJ Kapashesit) a shot at the pros, Saul finds himself overwhelmed by the racist toxicity that has afflicted his entire life.

Campanelli is a curious choice to direct this film. Clint Eastwood’s favourite camera operator has only one other feature to his directorial credit: Momentum (2015), a rote, high-tech action thriller. His work here is entirely competent, relentlessly sombre in tone, and elevated by solid performances by the three actors playing Saul at different points in his life.

But as heartbreaking as it can be, Indian Horse at times feels hermetically sealed in its mission to expose the horrors of residential schools. That’s an admirable enough goal, to be sure, but it’s one that deprives characters of identity beyond their suffering. For comparison, look at writer-director Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls, another film touching on the outrages of residential schools, but one that felt richer for having operated with characters — funny, angry, or calculating — that were more than the sum of their suffering.

Still, Indian Horse stands as an important movie in the climate of truth and reconciliation, especially in its subversive message that should jolt many Canadians like a cattle prod: There are some outrages even hockey can not transcend.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing