Kingsway: Mother-and-daughter become infidelity snoop-sisters in this antic Canadian domestic farce

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

I’m not sure if mother-daughter comedies even exist as a film genre (there’ve been plenty on TV, including Mom currently). But the Canadian domestic comedy Kingsway makes a solid case for it on the big screen.

The movie by Bruce Sweeney (Excited) – about a mother and daughter who take control over their son/brother’s love-life – doesn’t ride so much on its plot as on the antic skulduggery and bickering of sweetly-controlling mom Marion (Gabrielle Rose) and her no-nonsense auto-mechanic daughter Jess (Camille Sullivan). They snoop together, they accuse together, and they even hit a singles bar together, with surprising results.

Jess (Camille Sullivan) and Marion (Gabrielle Rose) decide to take action on a family feud in Kingsway.

By contrast, the center of the storm, Matt (Jeff Gladstone) is a somewhat inert male lead, an academic who’s ill-equipped to handle the nuts and bolts of real-life relationships. When we meet him, his mood is at some level beneath glum, he having spotted his wife Lori’s motorcycle outside a motel. When confronted, Lori (singer-songwriter Colleen Rennison) tells a fishy-sounding story about visiting a friend who’s in town for her dying mom.

Matt accepts the story, almost resignedly. But, their family honour at stake (and neither of them liking Lori very much), Marion and Jess, decide to take matters into their own hands and get to the bottom of the state of Matt’s marriage.

Sweeney has been making mostly comedies (an oddly unappreciated pursuit in Canadian cinema) since 1995’s Live Bait. And he likes to create characters first and plot second. And indeed, much of Kingsway plays out like it’s being made up as it goes along. But where drama demands precision, comedy often thrives on randomness.

So, we get episodes – like the scene at the bar, when an on-the-prowl Jess, complaining she hasn’t had sex in forever, comes up empty. Meanwhile Marion, without trying, attracts the attention of a man her age named Jim (Kevin McNulty), whom a wounded Jess dismissively nicknames “Santa Claus.”

There are misunderstandings, an errant suicide attempt, and a pregnancy with fingers pointed at a best friend (Paul Skrudland) . 

Things do get tied together in a little too neat a package, wrapped around some tasty live-performance blues-rock. Kingsway is a light comedy, to be sure, despite its underpinnings of depression and anxiety (which I think are required by law to be in Canadian movies).

But having said that, I would watch Rose and Sullivan play mom-and-daughter in any sitcom they chose.

Kingsway. Written and directed by Bruce Sweeney. Starring Gabrielle Rose, Camille Sullivan and Jeff Gladstone. Opens Friday, December 13 at the Carlton Cinema.