THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL

Time to dip into the vaults once again.  For this occasion, I want to present an old college assignment from 1995 that I think is worth sharing.

When you attend Mohawk College, besides taking all the classes associated with your major, you also have to take 2 Electives in order to graduate.  These are classes unrelated to your main course of study.  One of the Electives I chose was Canadian Writers which ended up being a very important class for me.

The professor loved my writing (I believe I had the highest mark in the class) and yet, she kept pushing for me to do better.  I appreciated that push.  It did wonders for my writing.

A lot of the assignments we were given in Canadian Writers were completed right in the classroom.  And then, there were the "out-of-class assignments".  I always preferred having more time and isolation to do these particular bits of writing because I felt I did my best writing when no one was looking.

My review of the movie, Whale Music, comes directly from one such "out-of-class assignment", which was really 3 pieces in one, and I rediscovered it while doing some cleaning up back in the summer.  The professor (whose name escapes me now) assigned us the following:  to write a response to a short story called "Going Out As A Ghost", to compose our own short-short story and to write a critique of a film of our choosing.  I had forgotten that, originally, I wanted to review a film called The Advocate which I still have not seen.  When I went to Blockbuster Video to rent it, incredibly, it was out on rental.  So, I chose Whale Music instead.  Re-reading my review after all these years reminded me of why the film failed to make a strong, positive impression.  I found it too depressing.

I didn’t mention it in the review but the film’s main character is very clearly based on the troubled Brian Wilson, the highly talented frontman for one of my favourite all-time groups, the Beach Boys.  Maury Chaykin (you know the face but not the name) plays a thinly-disguised variation on Wilson as best as one can expect but you wish the character had fewer distractions to deal with and that the screenplay would give us a reason to truly care about him.  

My review speaks for itself.  I have no interest in giving the film another chance.

In the entertainment world, being a self-destructive artist can be both a blessing and a curse.  On the one hand, you can always channel your anger into a composition of some kind and profit from your bitterness.  (It worked for Kurt Cobain.)  But then, you have to live with your pain, your denial, your absence of faith, your seclusion and the gradual deterioration of your soul.  (Cobain committed suicide after years of battling drug addiction and a lifetime of depression.)  No one deserves to suffer for their art like this.

In "Whale Music", a Canadian film released in 1994, Maury Chaykin plays Desmond Howl, a self-destructive, has-been rocker who is so bitter and repressed that his self-inflicted behaviour becomes an integral part of his daily routine.  He’s fat.  He lives in an enormous mansion that looks older than it actually is.  He has hallucinations.  He never leaves his property.  He runs around buck naked in his home recording studio while working on an artsy composition entitled Whale Music, his gift to the whales who live in the nearby ocean.  He likes to take "a refreshing dip" in his swimming pool which hasn’t been cleaned in years.  He takes his pills with a bottle of liquor.  He watches old home movies of much happier times in his life.  And he hasn’t worn anything other than his pair of swimming shorts and a bathrobe in years.

Not only is he depressed about his sagging career, he’s still mourning the death of his musician brother, Daniel (Paul Gross), who committed suicide and his ex-wife, Fay (Jennifer Dale), a groupie who betrayed their lust with another man years ago, wants to squeeze every last penny out of his diminishing bank account.  She wants him to sell the mansion.  He refuses.

Finally, there’s Claire (Cyndy Preston), an abused teenage runaway with a heart of gold who "crashes" at Desmond’s mansion only to find a friend, and inevitably, a lover who can relate to her pain.  Oh please!  Their relationship sinks the picture.  Chaykin and Preston have no chemistry together and how this woman ends up with Desmond is both a plot contrivance and a nuisance (not to mention a distraction as well).  She is so annoying and despite her bodacious figure, she’s a terrible actor.

Because of the presence of Claire (which, at least, inspired a great song by The Rheostatics), we don’t get to spend enough time with Desmond in his shell of failure.  It’s hard to empathize with a character who doesn’t seem to have any redeeming human qualities.  But this isn’t Maury Chaykin’s fault.  He does the best he can with the role.  The screenplay doesn’t take us as far inside his soul as it should have.

I like Jennifer Dale’s work as Fay, the gold-digging groupie and Kenneth Welsh’s performance is also noteworthy.  (He plays Desmond’s heartless distributor.)  But the movie has too many unnecessary characters that get in the way of a potentially good character study.

There is a good movie to be made from this idea.  "Whale Music", unfortunately, isn’t that movie.