Review: My Winnipeg

If ever there was not a movie made for the masses, this is it. Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg" is dense and bizarre, and even the hardiest of filmgoers will be pressed to comprehend it on a single viewing. The greater trouble is that many will not give it the benefit of repeat viewings because of the aggravation the first one might very well cause. This would be a shame, though, because whatever you say about the film, you can't deny that it approaches greatness, if it falls just a bit short because of its own imposed limitations.

The film is Maddin's middle finger/love letter to his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba (in Canada, but I hate adding that to the end; it'd be like saying "Chicago, Illinois, United States"). Maddin starts the film with a frenzied rambling that he sustains throughout, starting off with the highly questionable statistic that Winnipeg is the sleepwalking capital of the world, and that it is law that when a sleepwalker shows up at their old home, or a place they used to frequent, the current resident has to take them in for the night.

There's a lot of weirdness like this; as the film goes on, Maddin also asserts that many of the city's streets are named after famous prostitutes and that a seance was once performed in the capital building that involved a "spirit bison" and several of those prostitutes. The central idea of the film, though, is Maddin attempting to discover exactly what has kept him in a town he mostly hates for all these years. As he says, "After a lifetime of failed attempts, I'm getting out for good this time. Again!"

To pursue this, Maddin hires a series of actors to play his childhood family, including his actual mother. He recreates episodes from his childhood mainly in order to understand her, because he feels that her lap is the magnetic pull that keeps him coming back to Winnipeg. His narration conjures images of feverish rambling, as he often repeats himself over and over and returns to the same ideas, trapped inside the same loop that's kept him in town. He has to keep reminding himself to stay awake long enough to escape Winnipeg, because if he falls asleep, he'll sleepwalk right back home.

For all Maddin's disdain, though, he loves his hometown deep down. This comes through in a lot of the film, particularly when he talks about how the Winnipeg Ice Arena, where his father played and where he spent much of his young life, was torn down by the city after its attempts to bring in the NHL failed, and it could not generate money. Maddin has what I believe is actual footage of the dynamite destroying only the additions to the arena designed to placate the NHL; the skeleton remains intact, and citizens can be heard chanting "Go, Jets, Go" in honor of the Winnipeg Jets team. Not only that, but in Maddin's fevered imagination, there is a team of old Jets players, now of geriatric age, called the Black Tuesdays, who continue to lace up their skates and play in the arena even as wrecking balls demolish it around them.

Even at the end, when Maddin is inching towards his great escape, he cannot help but imagine a superhero, Citizen Girl, who will continue to look after his town and his mother when he leaves for good. Even if the film uses everything from animation to silent film cards, Maddin has told a story that every single individual in the world can understand, about the inextricable pull of "home," whatever or wherever that may be, and the inability of anybody to ever truly leave it.