Drive Back Home: Goin’ Down the Road in Reverse Meets Green Book
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Donald Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, a canonical Canadian film released in 1970, follows two men who drive from Novia Scotia to Toronto in search of adventure and economic opportunity. In the comedy-drama Drive Back Home, which is set in that same year, brothers Weldon (Charlie Creed-Miles) and Perley (Alan Cumming) take that long drive the other direction from Toronto to their hometown, Stanley, New Brunswick.
Writer-director Michael Clowater has said the story was inspired by real events in his own family. Still, it’s hard to ignore another movie that Drive Back Home resembles far more closely than the social realism of Goin’ Down the Road. That’s Peter Farrelly’s 2018 Oscar-winning dramedy Green Book with Virgo Mortensen as driver Tony Lip and Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley, the gay Black musician Tony chauffeurs through the Deep South in 1962.
Similar to Green Book, Drive Back Home is a road trip with scenes of arrest and imprisonment, car trouble, a quarrel and reconciliation and a daring rescue. Overall, it’s a similar period movie, mixing Odd Couple laughs with a parable of healing and acceptance.
An opening montage of archival clips of newspaper headlines, anti-gay protests, TV editorialists and footage of a police raids set the background: Those were scary times to be gay.
Cut to Weldon, a middle-aged man with a badger-striped beard and the affronted manner of a rudely awakened rooster. Weldon is taking a smoke break outside a church before the memorial service for his father, Perley Sr.
It’s a small congregation complete with period-appropriate stubby beer bottles and strange homemade salads, handed over with platitudes of condolences. But the brief testimonies from sons Moses (Gray Powell) and Weldon suggest the old man was far from dearly beloved. His widow Adelaide (Claire Coulter) seems almost buoyant at the passing of her husband. “Don’t be gloomy!” she advises.
Early in the morning after the service, Weldon gets a call from a Toronto cop, who says Perley Jr. has been arrested for having sex with another man in a public park washroom and the police will only release him to a guardian. (Along the way the policeman refers to the recent law that decriminalized homosexuality, though indecent exposure and gross indecency remain on the books.)
At Adelaide’s instance, Weldon hits the road, borrowing his company’s truck. His one great fear is that he has to drive through Quebec and he can’t speak French. He packs the pickup with cans of gasoline so he doesn’t have to make any stops on route.
Read our interview with Drive Back Home star Alan Cumming
Perley is, at least superficially, a much happier individual than Weldon and a better dresser. He wears a striped shirt with an ascot, checked pants. He’s a chatterbox who lives in a luxury if messy apartment. He even has an answering machine, a new-fangled device that Weldon has never seen before but when Perley goes to show it off, he learns he has been fired from his job at an advertising agency during his time in jail.
Arguably, the script falls into the trope that being gay means being silly. Perley wears a fuzzy fur hat, matching coat, and carries about his taxidermied pet pug, Brownie. But Cumming carries off the character persuasively, with a sort of forced cheerfulness that intermittently breaks down. When Perley gets emotionally agitated, he sheds his mid-Canadian accent for salty Maritime obscenities.
In the balance between comedy and drama, Drive Back Home is best at the comedy. The banter between Scotsman Cumming and English actor Creed-Martin is consistently deft. Canadian theatre vets Coulter, badgering her grownup son, and Guy Sprung as a French-Canadian farmer the brothers meet, also get some welcome comic screen moments.
The script is much less convincing at the darker stuff. There are repeated flashbacks to a burning barn, the outsized anger of the father, and the very bad thing that happened when Perley was 16 that scarred both him and his younger brother. Trauma narratives tend to feel more credible when they’re less schematic.
As a director, Clowater is attentive to detail both in dialogue and surroundings. Radio music and news of the period sounds authentic enough (excluding a silly subplot about Russian spies). In the packed soundtrack, singer-songwriter Hayden Desser’s dozen songs of downbeat resignation seem more than needed.
Also, there’s a repeated motif of the traditional Irish children’s song, “I’ll Tell Me Ma” with its refrain, “I’ll tell me Ma, when I go home the boys won’t leave the girls alone.” Certainly, it sounds folksy, and possibly serves as an example of toe-tapping heteronormative indoctrination. Also, the boys won’t leave the boys alone.
Drive Back Home. Directed and written by Michael Clowater. Starring Alan Cumming and Charlie Creed-Miles. In theatres December 6.