Past, present, and future all share the stage — individually and collectively — in Thom Fitzgerald’s florid family drama, The Hanging Garden. The Canadian film is a homecoming story in which a gay son’s return to his dysfunctional family after a 10-year absence proves that you can indeed return home again. Or maybe that you can’t. Who knows? Both explanations are possible. That’s part of what makes this wildly popular festival-circuit movie at once so amazingly compelling and so maddeningly illogical. The film is built on an uneasy blend of stylistic elements: kitchen-sink realism and magic realism. The merger of styles allows the returning son to see not only the shape of things in the present but also the living traces of things that occurred in the past. The strategy works for the first half of the film, but then it depicts an event in the surreal realm that’s so literal — so definite and unambiguous — that the image undermines the film’s whole narrative technique and makes all meaning permanently elusive. To its credit, however, The Hanging Garden is an absorbing and wholly venturesome effort despite this serious narrative misstep. Writer-director Fitzgerald has created a rich study in the ways in which we are all inextricably tied to our family histories, no matter the extents we go to outrun, bury, or celebrate its ghosts. The Hanging Garden begins as Sweet William (Leavins) returns to his childhood home to attend his sister’s wedding. (All the family members in this movie are named for flowers.) Now a svelte and handsome young gay man, William is haunted (figuratively and literally) by the obese, sexually confused teenager he was when he left the family fold. Each character we meet is drenched in melodramatic juju, although Fitzgerald manages, for the most part, to focus on the eccentric rather than the harsher aspects. Sister Rosemary (Fox) makes a less than romantic bride in her white gown as she curses, swigs beer, and wages constant battle with her ungainly bridal train. Tomboy sister Violet (Dunsworth) is even less starry-eyed about the whole affair. The groom Fletcher (Keller) is the teen who first seduced young William and then rejected him. Mom Iris (McKenna) is a cryptic figure, who mysteriously takes a powder following the ceremony. Dad Whiskey Mac (MacNeill) more than lives up to his name, a gardener and a drunk who fluctuates between moments of aggression and tenderness. Grandma’s up in her room, a religious fanatic whose Alzheimer’s-related senility causes many an inappropriate scene. Hell, even the family dog has gone blind and now falls down and walks into walls. An array of rich performances — notably those by Kerry Fox (who was so memorable in An Angel at My Table), Troy Veinotte as the sensitive, overweight teen version of Sweet William, Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter) as the teenaged Rosemary, and Seana McKenna as the inscrutable mother — add credence to the goings-on. The Hanging Garden keeps one of its very big secrets ’til the very end and even once you learn what it is, nothing is clarified. But still, in terms of presenting a story about the how the present is fertilized in every sense by the past, The Hanging Garden brings home the harvest.
This article appears in July 10 • 1998 (Cover).
