Film Review

Directed by Jordan Roberts

Warner Independent Pictures

The redemption of a long-estranged parent is hardly a novel plot in contemporary cinema; it has congealed to the point where every hug, tear and clumsy montage seem carefully choreographed.

Refreshingly, Around the Bend, director Jordan Roberts’ debut film, which won two awards at this year’s Montreal Film Festival (the Jury award and Best Actor for Christopher Walken), reveals an organic push and pull that approaches the mostly shapeless narrative of real relationships.

Part of the source of this unaffected sentiment is the way Roberts’ closeness to the narrative seeps into the film. The script, which Roberts spent seven years writing, is based heavily on his own tangled relationship with an absentee father, giving it a palpable authenticity that is only reinforced by the subtle performances of screen legends Walken and Sir Michael Caine.

The first shots of the film pan around a dusty attic, presenting bleached skulls and archaeological trinkets like a still life on a conveyor belt, until the camera settles on Henry Lair (Caine). Henry, the ailing patriarch of the fragmented Lair family, has just summoned his son Turner (Walken) to what he knows to be his deathbed.

Now, Henry sits calmly in stodgy professor get-up staring at death with a smile, reveling in the simple pleasure of ”drumming for an idea.” He exudes the demeanor of someone who has fully understood life’s glory, and wants nothing more than to share this feeling with others, especially Turner, who walked out on his own son Jason (Josh Lucas) thirty years earlier.

When Turner tries to leave again after only one day home, Henry takes him to task, declaring that he is “still on the stairway,” and not yet able to mend his relationship with Jason. A large part of Turner’s reason for staying seems to be no nobler than his attraction to the madcap Danish nurse Katrina (Glenne Headly) hired by Jason to tend to Henry, nicely echoing the 1988 film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in which she and Caine had an electrifying comedic dynamic.

After Henry’s sudden death, however, the three remaining generations of Lair men (including Jason’s son Zach, played precociously by Jonah Bobo) embark on a macabre scavenger hunt to fulfill the seemingly arbitrary ash-scattering commands of Henry’s will. Their rusting VW bus barrels across the kaleidoscopic mesascapes of the Southwestern U.S., a sensitive narrative unfolding like the detailed notes they must open at each Kentucky Fried Chicken they visit.

Walken’s portrayal of Turner avoids shortcuts: he refuses to spend the trip begging for Jason’s forgiveness. Instead, they slowly edge towards an understanding, with both men making human missteps along the way. After realizing that the places they visit were chosen by Henry to force him to painfully relive past traumas, however, Turner, believing that his old man does this out of spite, bitterly spits out, “My father always loved digging up old shit.”

Turner, however, slowly opens up to his restored family as the journey proceeds, and starts to mention parts of his life that have been kept in the dark for decades. He first acknowledges his criminal past with a wry comparison to Henry’s archaeological digs, telling young Zach that “some things want to be taken.” Just as Henry only brings his fractured family together by stealing them, Roberts has shown that he’s not just “digging up shit,” but reassembling a borrowed genre with a subtle touch.