(courtesy IMDb)
One of the most rewarding aspects of watching any film that takes its time with its storytelling is the richness of humanity that often emerges in ostensibly quiet moments.
It’s an approach that mirrors life, which for its seismic shifts and momentous twists and turns, often expresses itself most forcefully and emotionally in the quietness of day-to-day life.
No fanfare, no big parades, no crescendos, just things happening as life goes on its merry way.
Drive Back Home captures this big-emotions-in-small-moments dynamic quite beautifully and affectingly, driven by a thoughtful screenplay by the film’s writer and director, Michael Clowater, who has a distinctly personal connection to the story he penned and which he brings to life in way lightly humourous and darkly troubling.
In the 1950s, Clowater’s grandfather, who only had a fourth grade education and who had never left the village of Stanley, New Brunswick where he was raised and where he works as a plumber, gets a call from a police station in Toronto, some 1300 km away, during which he’s told his brother has been arrested for having sex with a man in a park.
Under the provincial practice of time, anyone caught having gay sex in Ontario could evade formal prosecution and jailtime if a family member agreed to collect them and take them home.
It seems on the surface like a humane policy but of course, it’s being done for judiciously expedient reasons, and while the offender may escape going to prison, they have been effectively outed to family, employers and friends and their lives can never be the same again.
Set in 1970, Drive Back Home explores what happens between two brothers, Weldon aka Wid (Charlie Creed-Miles), who is the fictional personification of the director’s grandfather and Perley (Alan Cumming) who is unapologetically gay but who, like the men of his era, was forced to live his life very firmly in the closet.
Through harrowing flashbacks, the exact nature of which must be left to the viewing and which graphically explain why Weldon and Perley are forever and inextricably linked even though they don’t particularly like one another, we come to see that Perley’s family have always known he was gay, even though no one can bring themselves to admit that that’s who he really is.
Certainly even as he confronts the nature of Perley’s arrest and see evidence that he is not even remotely straight – this takes place on the road in a scene which is darkly affecting as a moment of release for Perley with a closeted young man from the neighbourhood soon becomes something altogether more violent and life endangering – Wid has no choice but to embrace who Perley really is.
But the journey of some sort of rapprochement between the two brothers is far from an easy one, playing out over the long drive home, a road trip loaded with remembered past trauma, secrets emerging left, right and centre and an uneasy grappling with the truth with which neither man is entirely comfortable.
While Drive Back Home has buoyant moments of real humour, thanks to Wid and Perley’s no-nonsense, sweary mother Adelaide (Clare Coulter) and Cumming himself who, in the lighter moments of his performance tries to deflect moments of great pain with quips and wisecracks (not always to any great effect, certainly not with Wid), it is also a deep dive into the homophobic horrors visited upon people like Perley by a society brainwashed into believing that the simple reality of someone’s sexuality is some sort of evil act of malignant perversion.
It’s not, of course, but Perley, who you can tell is desperately lonely and who wants connection with someone, even his estranged brother, has to navigate this deeply-embedded and frankly dangerous untruth over and over again, and it’s his ongoing pain, which began with a trauma incident when he was 16, which seizes your heart again and again.
But what’s also intensely moving is how much Wid wants to make some sort of peace with his brother and their shared traumatic past even if he can’t bring himself to express it. (He is a man of few words and little emotion, something brought keenly to life when his wife Martha (Sprague Grayden) playfully pushes on a phone call to admit he might just be missing her; he eventually answers “Maybe).
The core of Drive Back Home is not some railing polemic against the evil of societal and institutionalised homophobia, thought it’s clear from the film how awful and destructive this is in so much ways; rather the film concentrates how hiding the truth from those you love and society at large has a corrosive effect on everyone, not just the LGTBQI+ person in question.
Perley is clearly deeply traumatised by what he’s gone through but so is Wid, and the hidden away corrosiveness of the traumatic event that dare not speak its name, has hobbled how the two brothers relate to each other but also how the family as a whole relate to one another with, for instance, a third brother, Moses (Gray Powell) and Wid’s son Ellis (Judah Davidson) treating Perley, in his absence, like a leprous wound that needs to be treated with extreme prejudice.
It’s horrific fallout and this is just one family.
While the death of the abusive husband and father, Perley Hinson Snr, has freed Adelaide and her boys from his hateful cruelty, they remain imprisoned by events long past and attitudes long entrenched which you can only hope will be dealt with once Perley Jr and Wid make their way home on a road trip that is far from uneventful and which serves to lay bare truths long avoided while building bridges that might make the future a less traumatic place to occupy for all concerned.
Driven by stellar, nuanced performances, a screen play full of empathy, thoughtful insight and raw, deeply affecting humanity, and deftly deployed humour that sits entirely at ease with the film’s skillfully realised darker moments, Drive Back Home is a true delight which lays bare why bigotry of any kind is so poisonously damaging and how the truth, once exposed, does have the power to truly make you free.