Brotherhood: Legendary Kawartha tragedy stands as an unsteady metaphor for a lost generation of boys post WWI
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
There are always tragedies. Add subtext and you have a story. Brotherhood – the true story of a 1926 teen boys’ camp outing in the Kawarthas that saw 11 killed in a freak storm – is interestingly fashioned as a “lost generation” metaphor.
It’s a metaphor with some loose ends, to be sure. Richard Bell’s ensemble survival story introduces us to a group of boy-men almost all suffering from a lack of male role models, their fathers mostly having been killed in the Great War or by the Spanish Flu pandemic (which itself was a by-product of that war)
In 1926, a group of teens set out on an ill-fated canoe adventure in Brotherhood
Male bonding stories are out of sync with society these days, and when war veteran camp counsellor Robert Butcher (Brendan Fehr) assesses his young charges to the less macho Arthur Lambden (Brendan Fletcher), he decries a generation of young men who’ve been, “feminized by their mothers and teachers.”
In real life – and in the movie – there’s no suggestion that overzealous hyper-masculinity had anything to do with why all but four of a war-canoe outing perished in fresh water (though one wonders why they’d risk canoeing at night in even the best of weather).
Still, the general tension between Butcher and Lambden over what masculinity means is the movie’s dramatic tent-pole. In Butcher’s eyes at least, the boys are being trained to be leaders of men. And, unanticipated as it may be, their struggle for survival is to be a crucible for that.
As one who canoed hundreds of miles of Northern Ontario in my teens, Brotherhood took me back. The location offers some of the most beautiful scenery in the country, and the experience of camping for days on assorted islands with friends, completely disconnected from the outside world, is almost a thing of the past today.
Brendan Fletcher and Brendan Fehr play counsellors with different ideas about raising boys in Brotherhood.
Given all that, director Bell makes some puzzling choices that literally keeps the viewer in the dark for much of the movie. The canoe accident itself cannot be avoided as a necessity for night-shoots. The film episodically jumps back and forth from that event to scenes from the happier prelude. But for some reason, even those moments often take place at night (adults and boys bonding and joking by firelight or in tents), limiting the cinematography options. This is a very dark movie, in more ways than one, and it doesn’t have to be as much as it is.
As for the boys themselves, there are too many to afford each much character development. There’s the kid who’s afraid of the water because his father drowned. There’s the one who wants to be a priest (or maybe not), and so on.
Bell takes the wisest route in this situation, sketching in most, and focusing on one lad, George Waller (The Order’s Jake Manley), a rebel, whose “bad boy” tendencies represent leadership gone astray.
As I say, sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy. There’s no larger reason for it. Brotherhood seeks one, in the context of a time too far back for us to really know. And to that end, the actors are all-in. It is an entertaining survival adventure, even if you don’t entirely buy its subtext.
Brotherhood. Written and directed by Richard Bell. Starring Brendan Fehr, Brendan Fletcher and Jake Manley. Opens Friday, December 6 at Cineplex Yonge/Dundas.