The
Hanging Garden is a story about an Irish family somewhere
along the coast of Nova Scotia, where luscious flowers grow
in a garden nearly every month of the year, and many of the
characters are named after flowers, whose characteristics
define their personalities. Titles announce three chapters
in the nonchronological story, which is directed, produced,
and written by Thom Fitzgerald. At the center of the film
is William (played by Chris Leavins), who returns home after
ten years to attend his sister Rosemary's wedding. As the
tagline of the film proclaims, "It's hard to go home . . .
ten years after your death." He discovers a dipsomaniac father,
a frustrated mother, a grandmother with Alzheimer's disease,
and a younger sister Violet (played by Christine Dunsworth)
who is a tomboy of about six years of age who seems destined
to become a Lesbian. Because the father, Whisky Mac (played
by Peter MacNeill), bullies everyone, we presume that William
was forced out of the house when his same-sex proclivities
came out of the closet, though we also see that he was overweight
and physically abused by his father. Seduced by a boyfriend
to strip naked and kiss ten years earlier, his grandmother
Grace (played by Joan Orenstein) spied on the kiss from her
upstairs window and had a fit, prompting his mother Iris (played
by Seana McKenna) to take him to prostitute Dusty Miller (played
by Martha Irving) so that he could be seduced into the world
of heterosexuality. One of the film's chapters contains a
symbolic suicide by William, representing allegorically his
withdrawal from membership in the family. But William appears
to have much serenity and considerably less weight now, since
he has found a loving relationship with a man named Dick.
Instead, the family to which William returned is in the final
stage of total deterioration. Rosemary (played by Kerry Fox)
obviously married to get away from her father; her spouse
Fletcher (played by Joel S. Keller) is the one with whom William
tricked ten years earlier, and Rosemary lets the two men pick
up briefly where they left off. Iris realizes the wisdom of
William's decision to leave the family and departs the next
morning without telling anyone. Whisky Mac arranges to ship
Grace to a nursing home. William, finally, drives back to
the happy life with his partner, with Violet accompanying
him as the newest member of the family. The film is a paradigm
of what happens when gays are rejected by a dominant father,
who destroys himself out of misplaced guilt and then destroys
the love that once produced happy children. The Hanging
Garden also shows that sexual orientation is something
inside one's own destiny, not something born of seduction.
The film's sequel, if one comes, promises to be a paradigm
of how same-sex families have so much love that they can heal
the wounds of children from broken homes. MH
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