The Grand Seduction movie review (2014)

This might read as a description of an insufferably broad film that's trying way too hard. Somehow it doesn't play like that. Why? Maybe it's because McKellar, adapting screenwriters Ken Scott and Michael Dowse and his ensemble cast favor subtlety. The actors put across funny bits with a deadpan reaction or awkward pause, instead of hammering them home by indulging in double takes or hitting key words hard. Gleeson in particular has an uncanny ability to wring laughs from lines that, on paper, aren't innately funny, by delivering them as if they were just another thing to say. When Murray calls a town meeting by exclaiming "Hear ye, goddamnit, hear ye!" or presents the fundamentals of cricket to his fellow townspeople by intoning, "It is your civic duty to study these rules," or innocently inquires of Paul, "Will ya be needin' any cocaine? We're down wit' it," you're watching a master actor teach a less-is-more class.

The other actors are attuned to Gleeson's wavelength. I'm still chuckling at the memory of Paul's crusty pal Simon, played by the great Gordon Pinsent, explaining that watching cricket is "like watching baseball, only longer." Kitsch's role is thankless—Paul is all befuddlement and, in the film's later stage, heartbreak—but he fully commits. The moments when Paul earnestly compliments folks who've been deceiving him for weeks have a perverse edge, because the townspeople don't seem to feel too guilty about the ruse. It's about reviving a nearly dead town; the doctor is but a means to that end. The filmmaking errs on the side of minimalism as well. One of the biggest laughs comes not from a line of dialogue, but a transition: Murray learns that Paul lost his dad at a young age, and we cut from a closeup of Murray thinking to a shot of Murray and Paul fishing together. 

For a supposedly feather-light comedy, "The Grand Seduction" is unusually interested in the fate of traditional labor in a cruel global economy. The town's deception of Paul has a metaphorical dimension—all over the world, communities are rejecting their proud pasts and adopting new identities to survive—but it's one that's never emphasized at the expense of laughs and sentiment. The toughness of the plot's resolution surprised me. We don't find out that the oil people are basically decent at heart, nor does the film congratulate itself for siding with the down-to-earth folks in the fishing village. The movie's wise enough to realize that a community that needs jobs often doesn't have the luxury of disapproving of whoever's holding the checkbook. It's more of a jump/how high situation.

This is a contrived and formulaic movie, and the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it for longer than five seconds. But it's graceful and sweet and wise where it counts, and often brilliantly acted, and it made me laugh. If I rated movies based purely on originality, I'd give "The Grand Seduction" two stars, maybe. The extra star is for the pleasure it gave me.

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