Aberdeen offers unfortunate proof — not that any was really needed — of how hard it is for well-intentioned films addressing important subject matter to nonetheless transcend other limitations. Child abuse, racism, homelessness, white ethnocentrism, alcoholism, queerness, the foster care system, cancer: all of these potential ills of Indigeneity are important in real life and in Aberdeen, a new drama set in and around the Peguis First Nation near Winnipeg, Manitoba, co-directed by two First Nations directors. If films were judged on nothing more than the discursive weight of their themes, it’s difficult to imagine there being many more important films to premiere this year. It’s regrettable that the film as a whole — from the skeleton of its script all the way through the performances — can’t hold a wick to directors Ryan Cooper & Eva Thomas’ evident ambition. Perhaps it’s still an important film, but it’s not particularly good.
Gail Maurice is Aberdeen, the titular woman from Peguis, and her life is a wreck. Across the film, we watch as she enters full destructive mode. Her addiction to alcohol, propensity to belligerence, and stubbornness make even her closest of friends and family distance themselves from her for their own good, and as we meet her she is in desperate need of proof of identification to begin the process of taking custody of her grandchildren. Maurice plays the role with an uneasy edge, where even the slightest inconvenience causes a theatrical eruption of emotion that often comes across as unearned. Her queer friend Alfred is played by Billy Merasty, and he’s the only person she can go to during her bad spells or troubles with the law — and even he eventually has too much of her shenanigans and pushes her away. (Though he does at least come back into her life when she truly needs a friend.) It’s a relief for reviews, too, because his presence as the stereotypical flamboyant drama queen is tough to watch in its reductive presentation. Merasty’s performance has the same quickness to arrive at its intended impact that plagues Maurice’s Aberdeen, though, which makes it far likelier that the script and not the acting talent is more fully to blame for these characters’ shortcomings.
Speaking of the writing, Aberdeen is just a short 83 minutes (it feels much longer), and it’s not certain that three hours would have been enough to apparently and effectively resolve all of the thematic cans of worms opened here. Cooper and Thomas throw social issues at Aberdeen like kids playing catch at recess. Her brother has cancer, addiction hangs like a noose around her neck, her grandchildren are in the care of a white family, the Canadian state bureaucracy (Indigenous Affairs) seems set to specifically target her and make her life miserable. Her hellscape living — partly of her own doing certainly, but only in so as much as she’s reacting to systemic problems that unfairly inflict First Nations people — with its listicle of social ills insists upon itself a representational reading that hurts the film; by having one character go through so much, the script almost begs her to represent an entire community — and that’s an impossible (and dangerous) ask. And heavy as they are on Indigenous communities, the very pedagogical themes churned about here make it impossible for an emotionally balanced viewing experience, the two elements hindered by each other. The only two checklisted issues that stick around long enough to provide some sort of fulfilling payoff are Aberdeen’s struggles with alcoholism and her navigation of the foster care system, and it’s possible to imagine an even more rhetorically persuasive film were these the main focus and several other dangling threads excised.
The film’s worst scene takes place in a public park somewhere in Winnipeg. Aberdeen, Alfred, and Alfred’s white “boy toy” Raven (Liam Stewart-Kanigan) beg for money. The white boy keeps messing around and ruining the painful chore that the two Indigenous characters clearly have much more experience with. A white woman taking a jog through the park comes up and snottily shouts at them to “get a job” and proceeds to call them useless savages. Her Karen-ignorance sets off a pandemonium that doubles as a pissing contest for the worst line-read. It also clarifies the film’s likely intended audience in a way that was probably already clear to most viewers: white Canadians.
It’s not all this bad, thankfully. Cooper and Thomas do show some potential as directors (if less so as writers), and a treaty-money scene here easily delivers the film’s best moment. Aberdeen and Alfred go to pick up their treaty money on Treaty Day and are forced to suffer a tedious line. Alfred, his proud head held high, is informed that since he didn’t pick up his money last time, he will receive double now. The woman hands him his $12 and he smirks, this before tricking her that Raven, his very white boyfriend, is, in fact, his son — he doesn’t actually have one — and thus due money as well. The reveal of the essentially useless amount delivers both humor and pathos, the small-scale grift resulting in a lousy sum that still genuinely matters to both Alfred and Aberdeen.
Perhaps the best one can say about Aberdeen, then, is that the next time Cooper and Thomas set out to make a film, this viewer will still be interested. There are too few Ojibwe filmmakers telling their stories, and even fewer directors writ large capable of constructing something as layered and effective as the treaty day scene. In the meantime, maybe Aberdeen will remind its viewers and aspiring filmmakers that miserabilism, even when punctuated with humor, is rarely the way, and the useful art-to-good-art trajectory takes more than a mere self-reflection.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
