We're All In This Together: Katie Boland Soars in Deft Acting-Directing Dysfunctional Dramedy
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
In We’re All In This Together, Katie Boland transcends familiar indie film tropes of the wacky family reunion genre with the audacious multi-tasking juggling act, not only directing, producing, and writing but also co-starring as two battling co-lead identical sisters.
Boland adapted the film from Canadian author Amy Jones’ 2019 novel, about a wryly depressive woman named Finn, who is drawn back the wacky web of her family to deal with unresolved business.
After a drunken one-night stand, she reluctantly returns from her Southern Ontario city to her hometown of Thunder Bay because of a family crisis. Her mother, who has dementia, has gone over the 40-metre drop of Kakabeka Falls — a.k.a. “the Niagara of the North” — in a barrel, and survived, although she’s in a coma. The event has been captured on video and gone viral, which means the traumatic family event is available for everyone to gawk at.
Back in Thunder Bay, Finn temporarily lodges in the family home with her identical sister Nicki, a single mother who works as a hairdresser. Nicki wears animal-print halter-tops, ombre’d hair, and speaks in a more guttural register than her more refined sister Finn. A few years before, Nicki betrayed Finn by sleeping with her boyfriend, and got pregnant. Now she has a pre-teen son who has never met his biological dad.
Boland has stripped Jones’ novel of some of its major characters and their backstories, along with the shifting narrative perspectives. (I’m tempted think of it as The Patty Duke Show for the Fleabag era, but the overlap of people familiar with both programs is limited.)
The result is a movie that delivers an over-concentrated dose of indie-film wryness and pathos, and an assembly line of revelations, confrontations, and emphatic musical cues.
No sooner does Finn walk into a local bar than she gets punched in the face by someone who mistakes her for her trouble-causing sister. Barely is Finn home than she’s made it her mission to unite Nicki’s son, Berlin, with his sweet but unimpressive biological dad, Gord (Adam Butcher). One improbable crisis — mom goes over the falls — follows another.
Finn and Nicki also have a younger sister, 17-year-old Paris (Alisha Newton), who has developed a dubious secret online romance with a grown-up shark-protecting online celebrity (Saad Siddiqui) who just happens to be visiting nearby Duluth, Minnesota. When Kate wakes up from her coma, Paris seizes the chance to use her as the adult accompaniment she needs to cross the border so she can meet with her online boyfriend.
The performances are where We’re All In This Together gets more complex. A tricky part is played by Martha Burns as Kate, the unstable centre of the family, who emerges from her coma with a sort of regal detachment.
Treating disability as an opportunity for comedy or magical wisdom is a dubious business and Burns’ sympathetic characterization generally avoids both. Her character seems to float on a cloud of ethereal compassion toward her children, but she’s also bewildered by day-to-day reality and subject to the self-destructive fixation that led to her trip over the falls.
Ultimately, Boland holds the centre of the film with her double-trouble performance. With her chalk-white skin, dark lipstick, and brows, she has something of the appearance of a classic mime, a sort of baseline for her transformation into two similar but differently shaded characters. In the climactic scene, Finn and Nicki, on a long drive, get out of the car on the side of the highway, and thrash out their differences.
The substance of their argument about who did what to whom and why is of less interest than Boland’s highly nimble demonstration of simultaneous directing and acting skills. If it were a gymnastic or ice-skating event, We’re All in This Together would score decent marks on the compulsory figures, but it would excel on the extra points for degree of difficulty.
We’re All In This Together. Written and directed by Katie Boland based on the novel by Amy Jones. Starring Katie Boland, Martha Burns, Adam Butcher and Alisha Newton. In theatres now.