Shoestring Humanism

GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD makes an honest attempt at portraying the malaise of two working-class individuals. Unfortunately, filmmaker Don Shebib seems to have had little on his mind except his low-budget, and little to communicate but a warm feeling towards his Canadian environs. He has carried dramatic restraint to a fault, earnestness to dullness. He has, in short, made what Peter Schiedabl called "a dumb film about dumb people"; but where that reviewer could still praise the film for capturing the texture of a hand-to-mouth existence, I cannot. Shebib simply hasn't made it interesting: his insights are only tangential to his subject matter.

William Fruett's screenplay tells of two young men who leave a cloistered small-town existence in impoverished Nova Scotia for the promise of lively jobs, money and women in Toronto. They are, of course, doomed to failure. Their only city acquaintance is an uncle who refuses to recognize them; unable to find anything better, they finally drift to working in a bottling plant. Eighty dollars a week is a lavish salary to Peter and Joey, and they spend whatever they get on drinks and waitresses. When Joey, the more frivolous of the pair, knocks up a girlfriend and decides to get married, he goes on a no-down-payment buying splurge. He is left disconsolate when he and friend Peter are laid off after the summer peak season. Joey is left disconsolate; sensitive, once-ambitious Peter must bear most of the monetary burden.

It's all too sad, too much like a bad Depression novel where the unthinking masses are hauled off to a sheep-like death. On the verge of starvation (and Christmas) Peter and Joey rob a grocery store, bashing in the skull of a clerk who tries to stop them. At film's end they are in flight: once again goin' down the road, probably to another half-year of good times, hard knocks, tedium, and a folk guitar strumming on the soundtrack.

AT TIMES, Shebib timorously approaches the ideas defining his characters' conditions. Peter, hungry for a place in society beyond his education and cultural reach, has been brainwashed by the Polyanna media. Joey is sucked into high-powered consumerism. Both are removed from any contact with the upper classes. Truly saddening are the attempts Peter makes to talk with a Satan-enthralled ingenue in a record shop, and a coed of more super-ficial pretensions reading Hesse in a park. He is, in both cases, peremptorily cut off. It is probably a symptom of general urban paranoia that this action seems almost inevitable.

But Shebib's characters do not have the depth to recognize a need for values alternative to the status quo. Only once does Peter drunkenly mumble something about wanting to work with his hands to create something. For the most part, Peter and Joey are content to make the most of a bad job. And Shebib is content to keep his commentary on the surface of a story that doesn't go anywhere.

Goin' Down the Road owes much to the early DeSica in its attempts to communicate the feeling of a life-style by approaching its subject in its own terms, on its own grounds, avoiding the poetic affects a detached narrative viewpoint allows. It is the characters', not the director's moods we see being indulged. But Peter and Joey are simply not complex enough to carry a feature-length film.

Worst about the film is its view of work in a factory situation: it resembles the buddy-buddy army of Hollywood's World War II. There is jovial scowling at work details, the obligatory lunchroom ogling of a big-bosomed French wench. There is no mention of union work or political organizing. There is little manager-inspired tension, or sense of monotony and ennui in the work processes.

The film's failure is most tragic when viewed in today's film context. Taking advantage of student disaffection with the working-class, some New York City ex-ad-men fashioned Joe to play right into the fantasies of the more naive paranoids-and found themselves with the '70's first box-office smash. It is Peter Boyle's image of a gun-toting psychopath that has replaced Ralph Kramden as a symbol of the "lower depths" for the upper and middle classes. There hasn't been a decent manual laborer since, not even in Five Easy Pieces, which made the only repressed figure an ex-concert pianist. Even Brando's heroic dockworker from On the Waterfront would be a welcome addition to current filmgoer; though the enemy in that film was a crooked union (read in Kazan's anti-communism) and the force of good a priest (read in the moral order of liberal America); at least Terry Mullow was a full human being who had a culture of his own and thought about his life. If Shebib's point is that the working-class has become so mechanized that human values have been rooted out of it, he has not shown that socializing process.

ONE SHOULD, I suppose, be impressed by Goin' Down the Road as a first film. It is extra-ordinarily well-acted by Doug (Peter) McGrath and Paul (Joey) Bradley, carefully photographed and edited-technically proficient. But its director displays an extremely limited intelligence, an interest in people on the most superficial level. He tries to consider their emotional make-up divorced from their serious social inter-actions, and ends up with roadhouse cliche.

Shebib came off very well at a Sack-sponsored press conference, obviously still flushed with his victories in the Canadian Film Awards and a good set of New York notices. But he seemed far from the great white hope of North American Cinema, even if he has brought in his first film for $82,000 at the age of 32. When pressed, he expressed some concern for the economic restructuring of the film industry itself. But he did not feel that he or his films should propose alternatives. His attitudes reflected an art for art's sake creed. Though he felt that American students had gotten the FLQ situation confused, that what held French-Canadians back industrially is their own repressive, Church-oriented ethnic tradition, he does not want to make a film on the subject: "It would have to be too informational.... I'm interested in the emotions."

Goin' Down the Road is a product of its creator's lack of perspective. If it weren't so sincerely misguided, it would be highly offensive.