Close to You

Since 2010, shortly after I saw Inception, Elliot Page has been my answer to the “who would play you in the movie of your life” getting-to-know-you question. In 2010 he looked like a cool sad girl. I looked like a plate of noodles in an Amish nerdboy suit. It was a weird thing for me to say in 2010. "We just have exactly the same vibe," I'd say.

In retrospect, that shared vibe might have just been invisible, inexplicable, disembodied, bottomless pain - transness is probably the only thing we actually have in common.

It was vindicating when they came out as queer in 2014 - I was so proud of my casting. And almost too much when they followed me into transition.

Page is the best thing about this movie. He moves and talks and reacts like a trans man a few years into transition - duh, but also a specific thing I’ve seen a lot in my life that I rarely see on screen. His choices in the improvised scenes have depth. He and Hillary Baak have great chemistry that is specifically believable as childhood-friendship-with-queer-overtones-turned-midlife-romance (though the wrinkles of that could have made a movie of their own and aren’t explored). He and Sook-Yin Lee have one brief and cozy scene as queer housemates and should have had more - this scene is our only real clue to Sam’s current life and it’s hard to make sense of what Sam’s return home means to Sam without more clues to his life in Toronto.

Almost everything else about this film annoyed me. The film’s questions have almost nothing to do with Sam’s experience - they are all about the meanings that Sam has to the cis people he encounters. It feels like it was made in 2005, both in the cinematography (we don’t get shots of brake lights on the highway in the rain but we do get the Canadian railroad equivalent, alongside several long out-the-window-while-traveling shots, a bunch of twee and on-the-nose mirror/window shots, a lot of shakycam) and in the politics (the mere fact of a queer person constitutes a subject matter).

The dialogue is extremely odd. A lot of it feels like watching actors do Meisner exercises. It's empty of the details that come into actual people's actual speech, the details that shade our sense of history and place and relationship. It gives the movie a thinness. There's no meat on the bones of the movie's past, no hint of a world off-screen.

In many scenes (as often happens in Meisner exercises), the actors make unmotivated choices to add conflict. The characters avoid talking about anything directly (because their dialogue choices lack specificity) but their affect is as if they’re charging headlong into an argument.

And sometimes the improvisation is just very bad. The transphobia in the movie is cartoonishly acted and arguably confined to one single character. The father gets two embarrassing, overwrought monologues declaring how worried he’s always been about Sam and mourning Sam’s departure. Any scene with more than two people has way too much acting in it.

The scenes make very little sense together and are missing key storytelling elements. We get a father who claims to have been obsessed over Sam’s mental health shortly after Sam confronts his sister about being worried now instead of when she should have been, earlier. Both of these could totally coexist but they need some reconciliation. We get a sweet scene between Katherine and her husband which raises a bunch of unaddressed questions later about whether Katherine is risking her family situation and why she might do that. We see Katherine run into Sam on the streets of Toronto but Katherine doesn’t declare her desire until the following scene - is the implication that she went there and walked around looking for Sam’s red hat, because that’s so dumb?

Sometimes things do hit, despite this. There are like six minutes of gorgeous film here (including moments in the romance, the threesome banter/reconciliation, Sam’s brother running after him), and the emptiness of the film’s world wouldn’t matter so much if it didn’t run to 90 minutes.

fuck everyone who didn’t tell me about this movie