
I think it’s safe to say that as Canadians, we’re haunted by our country’s landscape. It’s as if there’s a giant elephant in the corner of a hardwood-floored room that makes a pretty unsettling creaking noise as it shifts awkwardly from foot to foot. One Week is a movie that stares that elephant down, grabs it by the tusks and says let’s go for a ride because life is too damn short.
I understand that you’re probably dubious. This is, after all, a flick that shares its title with the Barenaked Ladies’ song that saturated every sound wave circa 1999; how could it ever give a sure crowd pleaser like The Watchmen, for example, a run for its money? Well, dear reader, be prepared to be wowed.
One Week dramatizes that timeless pick-up query, “if you had one week left to live, what would you do?” Joshua Jackson, in a stellar piece de resistance that far outstrips his surly performance as Pacey the intellectually-frustrated badass on Dawson’s Creek, plays Ben Tyler, a young Torontonian who’s just been diagnosed with a far-advanced and aggressive form of cancer. Upon hearing this news, Ben naturally does the only logical thing to do; he buys a vintage motorcycle and upon the advice of a wise Roll-Up-The-Rim cup, goes west. The Timmy’s rim foregrounds this flick as a quest; even if there was any doubt about that one, Ben’s obsession with Tennyson’s Ulysses clears it all up. “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield” becomes his mantra as he sets out across the country, symbolically writing what the film’s producers have dubbed a love letter to Canada. This love letter, however, instead of strengthening Ben’s relationships with his family and fiancée, in fact reaffirms his relationship with himself.
It’s a relationship that Ben, like so many, has let crumble over the years and in the process of rekindling it, realizes that the choices he’s made have in fact compromised away essential parts of who he is. He discovers that the only reason he asked his fiancée, Sam (Liane Balaban) to marry him is because he ran out of reasons why it was a bad idea. He realizes that instead, he should have been finding reasons why he should write his novel or continue singing, for example. Oh sigh. How heart-warming! And if cardiac heat isn’t enough, One Week also delivers a bang-up line-up on its soundtrack. Yeah, we’re talking Great Lake Swimmers, Wintersleep, Joel Plaskett, Sam Roberts, and other home-grown talent, the soundscapes which, like our landscapes, give us something of a renowned reputation. Although One Week may sound too good to be true, fear not. There are a few glitches. For a movie that’s supposed to be about an individual’s relationship with himself, as discovered through a renewed understanding of his country, it excludes a giant portion of the country from that relationship: Quebec, the East Coast and First Nations peoples are all but ignored within this paradigm. Well, not completely ignored; early on, Ben meets a couple of Newfies who are biking—as in pedaling, sans motors—across Canada to win a bet involving a couple cases o’ beer. This episode provides unlimited fodder for cracking innumerable funnies at the expense of Canada’s favourite Maritimers, while also allowing Ben cause to take heart after a bout of discouragement on his own pilgrimage. Sure, it’s a funny little episode, but there is also a whole lot of stereotype-perpetuating going on that is a tad unsettling. There is even less attention paid to Quebec, aside from a nod on the soundtrack with a great old tune entitled “Un Canadien Errant”. Funny thing is, the song was written after the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837 and was used as a rallying cry for the exiled rebels who were condemned to death over the subsequent years. Ben, in the midst of a rather earth-shattering epiphany in the midst of the Rockies, sings this song with a wild woodsy girl around a campfire. But despite this moment of ostensive harmony between Ben’s identity and the surrounding landscape, the song’s content dealing with alienation and exile thickly ironizes and undercuts the entire scene.
The only encounter with Canada’s First Nations is in a puzzling and mystique-enshrouded scene where a man chants and drums in the middle of a redwood forest. Ben looks on, has a bit of a psychedelic moment, and then carries on with the show. I can’t figure out if it was a head-nod for the sake of it, or if there’s something else going on that is probably far above my head. Sufficed to say, if the image of a First Nations individual is deployed here in order to give the film extra “authenticity” or what have you, I can imagine how that could be seen as a little offensive to some.
Yes, these are all problematic features of the film, but let’s end on a positive note. Because One Week is indeed absolutely fabulous. Gord Downey cameos as a motel philosopher, Joel Plaskett cameos as a doe-eyed busker and my dad’s favourite T.O. restaurant, The Beer Bistro, gets a hat doff for a good five seconds of screen time. The flick is packed with enough familiar scenes and towns—for Canadians, anyway—that it feels as though you or your friends could appear onscreen at any moment. If you’ve got only one week to live, see One Week. It’ll cure whatever ails you.
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