Sweetland: Thoughtful Tale of a Newfoundland Hamlet So Dead Even the Ghosts Abandon It

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-minus

The tiny Newfoundland outport at the center of Sweetland is so decrepit and depressed that even the ghosts are moving away.

That’s just one haunting image offered up by this ethereal, thoughtful rumination on homeland and belonging from Newfoundland writer/director Christian Sparkes.

Sparkes worked with fellow islander Michael Crummey to adapt Crummey’s 2014 novel of the same name, and he gave a choice role to Mary Walsh. Honestly, if the film were any more Newfoundland, I’d be making bad jokes about it. (Can you even do that anymore? Sure I’s don’t know, b’y.)

Mark Lewis Jones surveys the dregs of his home village in Sweetland

But the plot is drawn from a serious bit of local history known as resettlement. From 1954 to 1975, some 300 isolated communities, home to about 30,000 souls, were abandoned under government programs that paid people to move to larger population centers.

And it didn’t end there; even in this century, the Community Relocation Policy has resulted in nine settlements pulling up stakes, the latest just a few years ago. Sweetland, splitting the difference, is set in 2012.

Sparkes takes a few artistic liberties with the process. In real life, a vote with a threshold of between 75 and 90 per cent of permanent residents has been required to instigate the move. In the movie version, it has to be unanimous, which allows Moses Sweetland (Welsh actor Mark Lewis Jones) to hold back the whole hamlet by sheer force of will.

This does not endear him to anyone except perhaps his nephew Jesse (Cail Turner), a troubled kid whose imaginary friend is Moses’ dead brother, and who enjoys the wild, windy serenity of the place. The opening scene finds uncle and nephew relaxing in the tall grass and listening to the ocean, as the former lighthouse keeper asks no one in particular: “Who’s got it better than this?”

For a while, it feels as though the movie is going to stray into thriller territory - someone’s been sending Moses threatening letters in the style of ransom notes, telling him to stop stalling. “You’ll be some sorry,” one of them reads, a lovely bit of vernacular.

But midway through the story, a series of tragedies convinces the old man to change his mind and agree to the relocation. This, even as he devises a plan for staying on as the sole occupant of the soon-to-be-abandoned outport, rattling around like a ghost in a ghost town.

As a filmgoer with a fondness for one-person-alone narratives, I found these scenes to be supremely moving.

But no man is an island, even when he lives on one. With a light touch, Sweetland suggests there isn’t much to keep the few remaining residents where they are, even as it shies away from pretending they’d be better off somewhere else.

They’re caught between The Rock and a hard place. It makes for some terrible choices, but a wonderful bit of storytelling.

Sweetland. Directed by Christian Sparkes. Starring Mark Lewis Jones, Mary Walsh. Opens May 17 at the Scotiabank in Toronto, and VIFF Centre in Vancouver.