Siblings 
Directed: David Weaver
Written by: Jackie May
Starring: Alex Campbell, Sarah Godon, Samantha Weinstein, Andrew Chalmers, Sarah Polley, Martha Burns, Tom McCamus, Nicholas Campbell, Sonja Smits, Paul Soles.
Country: Canada

(One) Bomb

Reviewed by Hal Gray

Six Feet Under.

The logline: Four underage brothers and sisters try to cover up the death of their evil parents so that they can be a ‘real' family.

The set up: Teenager Joe is counselled by Grandpa that family is everything. In fact, these are Gramp's last words. Mom, a snarky bitch, and Dad, a drunken letch, are hardly family material. In fact, none of the kids have the same combination of mother and father. Joe and the younger children, Margaret (16), Pete (9) and Danielle (7) wish them dead.

The hook: Joe has innocently drained the brake fluid to change the oil when, tongue-tied, he watches Mom and Dad drive off. When they don't come back, he's guilt-stricken and believes he'll be charged with murder. He tells the others and they plan the cover up. Then follows people being put in graves and taken out and put back in and—. What the filmmaker is reaching for here is something like Fargo, but he missed town by a mile.

This scenario—while rescuable—is wildly improbable. However, there is no sense of pacing, tension or drama. Incredibly, the inciting incident is unseen and other delicious opportunities go unfulfilled or are used for improbable plot development. The black humour is adolescent. The plot has more holes than it takes to fill the Albert Hall and the characters are painfully derivative. And three (or is it four) sub-plots add nothing to the story. (One brings the action to a grinding halt whenever it appears.) I might add, those are the more positive criticisms.

What really kills this film is you can easily see the screenwriter's big, greasy prints on the celluloid as she elaborately moves the characters around where she needs them to be and has them say what she needs them to say in order to produce convoluted details and antics. Could be funny, but it's not. If she needs them to see something in one scene, they see it, but if ‘the story' requires that they forget or ignore what they've seen in another, that's okay, too. Don't want to mess up a good story, do we? Does the director think that people won't notice? Apparently so.

Some annoyances (among many): At Grampa's wake, Joe explains to Gramp's inquiring lawyer all the children's intricate pedigrees. (Okay, some necessary back story and cleverly done.) But then we find out two minutes later he's been Gramp's lawyer for 20 years and there's nothing he doesn't know about the family. (Thud).

The fence that the parents crash through (off screen) is on their private road. After the accident, the lawyer supposedly misses the broken rails on the way up to the house, but stops to look at them on the way down. Then he conveniently shakes it off and goes on. I lost count, but several people multiple times have to pass by the site on their way to the house (a neighbour, two old ladies and Margaret's tow-truck operator boyfriend) and nobody says a thing or puts two and two together. (Groan.)

The word ‘fuck' is used so repetitively by so many characters it becomes grating and when it's used twice to get a cheap laugh—about the time everybody could use a laugh, cheap or not—it has no effect. (Fuck.)

A dog that farts. Scrimping on the SFX budget, we had to take the actors wrinkled noses for this tired excuse at humour. (L.)

Alex Campbell, as Joe, fluctuates back and forth between the steady, capable brother they all depend on and being on the edge of a nervous breakdown. A build up from the first to the second may have helped. Sarah Godon as the self-centred Margaret, who ‘just needs to get laid' in the tow truck on a regular basis to relieve the boredom of life, is so harsh and sneering, she out-nasty's the parents. Why the other three would care about her, as they seem to do, is a mystery. Andrew Chalmers quietly and effectively deals with his push/pull relationship with death. Samantha Weinstein—and not to her discredit—is supposed to be an intelligent kid who everybody thinks is stupid because of her big, thick glasses; but in her ‘big' scene, stupid is exactly how she's portrayed.

Tom McCamus, as the lawyer; Martha Burns, as the neighbour he's shagging; and Sarah Polley as Joe's love interest do their bit, but they take up too much screen time. Nick Campbell and Sonja Smits give the necessary oomph but exit too early. Paul Soles, his timing as impeccable as ever, dies in the first scene.

What is most distressing, is that Siblings arises out of the Canadian Film Centre and its honourable commitment to bring students' work to the big screen. (Money was also thrown in by the Harold Greenberg Fund—a foundation supporting new cinema—and Telefilm.) "Aha," you might say, it's a ‘student film operating on a small budget. We should cut them some slack." The answer to that is no we shouldn't. And here's why.

The CFC and Greenburg deal with submissions all the time. Most, of course, are rejected. These organizations go to great lengths to patiently explain they are looking for screenplays with strong elements of plot, characterization, dialogue and dramatic/comedic tension and for the people who write them to have some kind of track record. The CFC develops one project a year and one should expect the best of the best.

That hasn't happened with Siblings. Far worse. The mistakes are amateurish and can't be tied to a small budget. After all, how much does it cost to buy a red pencil?

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