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| Perfect Pie (2002) Director: Barbara Willis Sweete Writer: Judith Thompson Cast: Wendy Crewson, Barbara Williams, Alison Pill Character: Don Rayford Billing: ??? Plot: A successful opera singer returns to her home village for a charity concert and revisits several people and events from her past. However, it is not only happy memories she finds there. Review: Kids are cruel. They call each other names, tug each other's hair, tell vicious lies, and somehow remain the best of friends. Perfect Pie attempts to show how these children become adults, or rather how the adults have been formed by the children they once were. Francesca is an unmitigated success story - a confident and assured woman who has survived three marriages and life in the city - whereas her childhood friend Patsy seems to be mired back in the town where they both once lived, married with kids of her own. While their lives have taken them to radically different places, no longer connected by high school and small town life, it slowly becomes apparent that they will always be connected through one night in the past from which Francesca has spent her life running away. The film's origins as a play are apparent in the strong characters of these two women, as adults, and as 15 and 10 year olds, with the six actors taken to play them all blending excellently into the central figures played by Crewson and Williams. While Patsy and Francesca, if they met for the first time now, would in all probability hate each other, these actors are skilful enough to not only play the present of their characters, but to also incorporate something of the past. These women were children once. Unfortunately it is where the film tries to expand out of the constraints of the play that weak notes are hit. Characters such as Don (McCamus) who are only mentioned in the play, here turn up in person and become less effective. Rather than being seen purely through the eyes of the women, as a perhaps ambiguous figure, he is allowed to be judged as a person by the audience, and comes across as such a quiet, unassuming man that any attempts to blame him for the past seem ludicrous. These attempts, primarily where Don and the other schoolchildren are concerned, to show rather than tell, generally form a sound cinematic principle. However in these cases, they are too often shown to be merely children rather than the beasts which Patsy and Francesca encountered. Perfect Pie would be a fascinating film if it was only for the strong central performances of Crewson and Williams, and it would be doing it a disservice to mark it down only for attempting to do more and not quite carrying it off. Trivia: Adapted from the play Perfect Pie by Judith Thompson. Barbara Willis Sweete's debut feature film. World premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2002. Ground Control went to the world premiere of this movie, and talked to Tom. Read all about it! |