Original-Cin Chat: The Invisibles' Bruce Greenwood Ponders 'Surfing' Through Life
By John Kirk
A playful series of piano chords heralds the appearance of Bruce Greenwood on my Zoom screen, and before too long, his smiling face greets me.
“How are you doing?” He asks.
I say I’m great. I’m actually not. My Star Trek brain is staggered as it processes the fact that I’m talking to Captain Christopher Pike (Greenwood’s character in the J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot of Star Trek). I’m in a state of fanboy worry, but Greenwood is cool; the enviable type of cool you wish you could muster when storms rage around you.
He astutely notices all of the Trek memorabilia in the background of my office. “It looks like you’re speaking from a pretty informed place,” he says.
I tell him it’s the room my wife hates, which elicits a laugh.
“Hey, then we’re in the same sort of room,” He answers.
It’s Bruce’s relaxed manner that brings me back to Earth. You can’t help but like him. He’s completely laid back, comfortable in a frayed blue t-shirt and surrounded by musical and historical items in his own sanctum sanctorum.
Bruce Greenwood plays Carl, the metaphysically-minded bartender in The Invisibles.
It’s like he’s channeling Carl.
Carl is the topic of our conversation. We’re talking about his performance as Carl in Andrew Currie’s The Invisibles. It’s a surrealistic fantasy starring Tim Blake Nelson as a man who starts to literally fade away from existence after a traumatic event he shared with his wife. Eventually even his wife can’t hear his voice and people begin to pass through him. He meets other people like him, including their de facto leader and somewhat of a spiritual guide, Carl.
Carl tends bar in an abandoned bowling alley for the other “Invisibles,” surfs in Malibu in winter and seems to know everything. Carl is cool, calm, collected and knows your favourite beverage instantly.
I asked Bruce what drew him to that character.
“You know, I met Tim (Blake Nelson) in a hotel lobby – we’d never met before – and we were both in town working on projects and said, ‘Let’s have dinner.’ We had this great conversation for a couple of hours, and four years later, he calls me up and says that they were doing this movie and they’d love for me to come and play.”
“I said yes, without reading the script. I was lucky it was really good!”
There’s a special quality about Carl. He’s like a cosmic traveller or guru who seems to know more about the strange dimension all of these people find themselves in. He’s their shaman, in a way. In a way, Carl embodies that special quality about the place.
I asked Bruce what he thought about he liked best about the film.
“The idea that we’re never far away from a dream or a fantasy or delusion that takes us to places that heal us or delay healing. It’s a place where you can go in your mind that open you up to a brighter future, for lack of a better phrase. Or worse. And that’s one of the things that this movie invites you to wonder about.”
What about Carl?
“Essentially Carl was an easy fit. I’m no stranger to self-delusion,” he says with a laugh. “When you think about the myriad ways we talk ourselves into points of view or an emotional reality, yeah. That character had honed this ability to talk himself into a state of being that is at odds with the rest of the world, but didn’t make the world around him less real.”
Carl has the talk. He knows the drink of choice for all of his guests. When Tim Blake Nelson’s character, Charlie, walks into the bowling alley for the first time, not knowing anything about his own new state of being, he is immediately put at ease by Carl’s easy-going acceptance of this new reality. Carl has a surfer attitude in realizing that while they may not experience life to the fullest, they also suffer no pain. His perception convinces Charlie that he should be grateful for what he has instead of lamenting what he has lost.
How did Bruce construct this character? I asked him what influenced his portrayal of Carl.
“I don’t surf, but I was talking to a good friend of mine who surfs and he said that surfers are often tagged with this label of being laid back and really cool. I think that’s a really antiquated version of what a stereotypical surfer exudes.
“But he told me something, that if you spend a lot of time with your bare feet on the ground, especially in sand and water, you’re grounded electronically in a way that’s different from people who are insulated from that. Literally, ionically, electronically grounded. So, I invested in that a little bit. In so far as what my character is experiencing is a construct of that.”
“It doesn’t work if you have a bowl of dirt in your house!” Bruce quipped.
There is also the connection of hurt and trauma that all of the characters in this story experienced at some point in their pasts. Their escape to this place is a reflection of escaping that pain. I asked Bruce if he thought the film was somehow therapeutic in a way.
“Ultimately the film is full of joy, right? The release of hanging onto the residual terror and grief is something we all struggle with, regardless of how much we dwell on the things that have bruised us. The more we invest in that injury, the larger that injury becomes – and more debilitating. The film speaks to that sort of dual pull of wanting to hang on to something that isn’t there anymore, and wanting to release yourself from that dependence.”
This film is filled with moments – deeply human moments that makes the audience wonder about our capacity to overcome trauma.
Overcoming trauma comes with the ability to recognize change. It also requires those empathetic people who are in tune with themselves and who also have the capacity to provide insight to others.
The Invisibles is a powerfully moving film that has all of those elements. It’s a film that speaks to the human condition of grief but it also shows us, that with the right people guiding our way, we can overcome that grief by moving forward.
I asked Bruce if he had a favourite moment in the film.
“Yeah. The scene in the bar where I tell Tim that I choose to believe, which speaks to the strength of his resistance to change. I don’t know if I’m a person who resists change more than I like, so for me, that little snippet really stuck with me. It made me walk away wondering … how aware I am of my own resistance to change?”
Carl is one of those characters who makes us wonder and clearly, Bruce Greenwood is one who wonders.
The Invisibles is in theatres now.