Canadian Film Pushing Some Hot-button Issued: "Whole New Thing"

Right on the heels of watching the Filipino "Last Full Show," I happened on another independent film, this time Canadian, in which an adolescent male yearns for an adult male in "Whole New Thing." In both instances, the adult male was gay, but the Filipino one was cruising for sex. The Canadian Maritime (Mahoney Bay, Nova Scotia) one cruises for sex, but with masculine adult males, not with fellow thirteen-year-old students.

The intellectually precocious and heretofore home-schooled Emerson Thorson (Aaron Webber) is considerably more sophisticated than his Middle School classmates, and has been raised by his Green parents without prudishness in talking about sex or being nude (how else to take a sauna?). Once in school Emerson develops a crush on Don Grant (Daniel MacIvor, a sometimes director who cowrote the script with director Amnon Buchbinder). Though delighted by a bright student who challenges him to teach Shakespeare (As You Like It) rather than some pabulum with Snowboard in the title, and remembering very well what it was like to feel different in a rural Nova Scotia school, the 42-year-old Don is fully aware of taboos against sexual relations with minors, especially students, and I don't think is attracted physically to Emerson.

For that matter, Emerson's attraction is not especially a physical one, though he is not just uninhibited but daring, at least verbally, and offers his body to Don. Don flees and heads for Halifax, where the love of his life lives. Things get very tense when Emerson goes with a "chicken hawk" and attempts to play the role of an experienced hustler.

Back-tracking, Emerson's mother Kaya (Rebecca Jenkins) decided he should go to school. Her stated reason is that he refuses to do his math (which one would think that his ecologist/inventor father, Rog (Robert Joy), would be responsible for...). She is tired of the isolation a trois with two difficult males, especially her increasingly cranky and depressed husband. Both Rog and Emerson quickly discover that she is having an affair and there are complicated fireworks (well, smokeworks?) among the straight adults.

I might as well add that Don has a somewhat senile but very abusive old mother. He moved back (from the provincial capital of Halifax) to take care of her, but, ironically, she is now in a nursing home in Halifax.

There are multiple issues explored in the movie, including the highly topical one of bullying boys who are not conventionally masculine, the mediocrity of public schools, burnt-out idealists, kids whose emotional maturity is considerably less than their intellectual attainments (this is the element I could remember especially well), libidos young and old, sexual candor, and intergenerational sex (this last does not happen, another parallel with "Last Full Show").

Webber, who had five years of theater background before starring in the film, is fearless and wry (both his performance and in undertaking. Emerson is not, however, invulnerable. The bonus feature interview with Webber suggests that his emotional maturity was greater than his character's.

Disappointingly, there is not an interview with MacIvor. In addition to trailers (including one for this movie), there is an interesting interview with Buchbinder, who discusses railings against the movie by people who had not seen it, Webber's fearlessness, and how funny MacIvor was. Buchbinder does not discuss why he did not explore the comic possibilities of the earnest back-to-the-earth parents, mostly opting for melodrama for them, though there are some comic verbal exchanges with their observant and very verbally dexterous son.

Weber's Emerson somewhat resembles a sexualized Harry Potter with family dynamics somewhat akin to those in "The Squid and the Whale," who nearly gets into "L.I.E." and "Mysterious Skin" plot/emotion territory (on his own; Don is not like the adults in those two American movies).

That the movie escapes the many clichés about closeted gay teachers and hormone-addled adolescents, takes a pass on opportunities to editorialize, and presents both Emerson and Don as complex rounded characters makes up for the relative lack of development of other characters and the somewhat dubious attempted charms of the folksy soft-rock music ("I Believe in the Good of Life", "We Oh We", "Builds the Bone", written by Joel Gibb, performed by The Hidden Cameras, who also did "Boys of Melody," used in "Shortbus")