Movie review: Sleeping Giant evokes the darkness of youth

By Jay Stone

The rugged, cynical and irritating business of being a 15-year-old boy is the subject of Sleeping Giant, a Canadian movie with a small feel but big ambitions: it’s a coming-of-age film in which the participants are dragged, kicking and screaming, into something close to what we adults like to call the real world.

It’s a painful thing to watch, but a worse one to participate in, and one of the corollary texts of Sleeping Giant is the realization — or remembrance — of how hard it is to grow up. It also serves as a reminder that, as tough as life can be on the other side of 60, at least one isn’t a 15-year-old boy any more.

It takes place in the vast and spare beauty of the Sleeping Giant provincial park on Lake Superior, a place of rocky shores, tall cliffs and plenty of woods in which children can get into all sorts of mischief. In the manner of the adolescent drama Stand By Me, of which this is the grittier cousin, it involves a disparate group of boys.

First is Adam (Jackson Martin), a freckled, sensitive youth whose affluent family has been coming to a yuppified cottage — from somewhere in one of Toronto’s more gentrified neighbourhoods, one assumes — for years. Adam has all the shy yearnings of a boy on the cusp of having working hormones; that is to say, he is a friend of attractive Taylor (Katelyn McKerracher), but he’s too timid to do anything about it. He also throws a baseball like a girl, as we used to say in the pre-enlightened era.

Adam has been thrown into the company of a couple of kids he probably wouldn’t meet if he weren’t at the cottage. Nate (Nick Serino) is one of those young troublemakers who fancies himself a truth-teller; he disguises his bullying as a challenge to self-awareness. Nate is a ringleader who cadges beer and cigarettes, organizes petty thefts, and acts artificially friendly around the adults until he can find their weak spots. Nate is the kind of kid who will grow up to become either a long-term convict or a captain of industry.

He’s staying at the cottage of his grandmother, who indulges his hell-raising, along with his cousin Riley (Reece Moffett), a tall boy with an overbite who lumbers around with the others, joining in his cousin’s hair-raising schemes — they include the theft of beer from the local liquor store — and also befriending Adam’s oh-so-earnest parents. His father (David Disher) is an especially egregious example of the modern dad who’s anxious to prove to the boys what a cool, permissive guy he is.

He doesn’t fool anyone, however, especially after Adam spies on him canoodling with a young woman at a lakeside fireworks display. This crack in Adam’s world is immediately exploited by Nate, who, we are given to understand, comes from fairly strained family circumstances himself and is delighted to welcome company, particularly the privileged.

The other character of note in Sleeping Giant is a 20ish drug dealer who lives in a trailer, sells marijuana to teenagers, and counts as the highlight of his life’s work the fact that he once jumped off an imposing cliff into the lake at an uninhabited island nearby. He has a video of the event that he will show to guests.

Toronto filmmaker Andrew Cividino — adapting his own short film — draws astonishing performances from the young people in Sleeping Giant. Martin, Moffett and (especially) Serino have a frightening, seemingly improvised authenticity, and watching them adopt poses and attitudes, trying them on for size, as it were, provides a chilling glimpse into the dangers of the teenage mind. It’s amazing any of us survived, really.

The adult performances are less successful: sometimes, Sleeping Giant is reminiscent of the old animated Peanuts TV movies in which parents are depicted as invisible presences who honk out the occasional order. You can see how Adam — through whose eyes the story is told — falls in with his desperado pals as an escape from the hypocrisy (and stilted acting) of his mom and dad.

There is an air of malevolence in the destructive shenanigans of Adam, Nate and Riley: this is more than teen high spirits, and Cividino — helped along by a portentous score by the rock band Bruce Peninsula — evokes a note of impending danger in every dare and challenge. You suspect something is going to go wrong, and of course it will; after all, the best that can happen is that they will grow up to become us.

THE EX-PRESS, April 27, 2016

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