The Canadian director Andrew Cividino’s feature debut Sleeping Giant is proof that a story well told, even if similar to many others, is worth telling.
Sleeping Giant is about three 15-year-old boys spending a summer in northern Ontario. It’s simple, intimate and so beautiful that I could suspend disbelief – really, another young-men-coming-of-age movie!? – and immerse myself, because like Richard Linklater’s excellent Boyhood, it is an immersive movie, propelled by convincing human interactions more than plot.
Two of the film’s three leads had never acted before (they are cousins, in real life, and Cividino found one on kijiji in Thunder Bay), and Cividino has said that he aimed for something that “felt more like eavesdropping and being along [for] the journey with the boys.” The film has this quality, and Cividino’s depiction of teenagers’ mundane troublemaking feels less like a depiction than a documentary, surrounding you in ways that feel personal.
The boys are Adam, Nate and Riley. Adam is quiet and watchful, “up north” because it’s where his parents recently bought a cottage. Nate is from the north and the most abrasive of the three. He lives with his grandmother, around whom he can smoke but not say “fuck.” Riley is Nate’s tall cousin, also from somewhere else, also staying with grandma and the gravitational centre of the group. Adam is unique in that his clothes fit and that he has nice teeth.
As we eavesdrop on these boys we are quickly introduced to the various terrible ways that 15-year-olds can behave towards each other. While they swing sticks and throw rocks in increasingly aggressive ways at a dead seagull, Nate and Riley awkwardly practice misogynistic ways of talking about Adam’s crush — we learn ways of being before we know what they mean. When Adam hits his head on a rock, Nate tells him not to be a “pussy” – though later, after a game of Settlers of Catan erupts violently, Nate’s grandma pinches his bloody nose and offers similar advice. And as a surprising love triangle develops with a girl we don’t learn much about – though to be fair, we don’t learn much about any of the women – Adam betrays Riley and propels the film to its vertiginous conclusion.
Different viewers will surely alight upon different moments in this film. An early scene of father and son playing catch struck me. Adam’s I’m-cool-I-say-chillax dad encourages him to “really have fun this summer.” “Don’t do what I did,” he continues, without explanation. A bit later he says the same thing to Adam, but more strenuously, and this time the suggestion sounds at once threatening and desperate. A father projecting his frustrations upon a son he is struggling to understand?
I remember the same conversation with an adult in my life (thankfully not my dad) when I was Adam’s age; I remember resenting that man for his projections, but also because his words were terrifying for what they implied. Was he really once like me? Would I be old and bitter like him? There are many of these adolescent moments of becoming in the film.
So if this is a movie about masculinity and male relationships it is also about class, though not in a straightforward way. There is no less love in Nate’s family than Adam’s. I was charmed by Nate’s back and forth with his grandma, about putting her in a home and about who would wipe her bum when she was old. Adam’s dad is sleeping with the woman from the fish market.
Finally, this is a film about nature, though I don’t honestly know quite what that means. The film starts and finishes with staggering shots of northern Ontario – thanks to James Klopko’s superb cinematography – but the boys’ interactions with nature have a jagged, violent edge. Nature is where they damage each other, physically and psychically: wrestling on a beach, tormenting animals and challenging each other’s manhood at the top of jump-into-water cliffs. This is prehistoric nature, here before us and here after, and in this way the backdrop punctuates a point Cividino never wavers from: we were once (perhaps) young and innocent, and now we are not. Sometimes this happens with a big splash, and there’s no going back.
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