If you need to spend time watching Alan Cumming traipse across the Scottish Highlands, I’d suggest any season of “The Traitors” on Peacock over the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition premiere “Glenrothan.” Certainly one of this stuff has intrigue, homicide, thrilling cinematography, and fabulous costumes. The opposite has a flat script and the tenor of a Hallmark film. It’s the latter that occurs to be getting a glitzy premiere right here in Canada.
This isn’t simply my half-hearted plea for a serious cinematic establishment to program a “Traitors” marathon. (Put Gabby Windey on a jury! That might be enjoyable!) It’s additionally a dig at “Glenrothan,” a waste of a proficient solid, together with Brian Cox, who pulls double responsibility as director.
Actually, it’s due to the promise of Cox stepping behind the digital camera that eyes are on “Glenrothan” at TIFF, however the commemorated performer brings not one of the chunk of his greatest performances to this job. One would suppose a person now most well-known for bellowing “fuck off” on “Succession” may need chosen a undertaking with a bit extra edge. As an alternative, “Glenrothan” is a surface-level story of household drama that isn’t all that dramatic.
Cox performs Sandy Nairn, the CEO of his household’s prestigious whiskey firm within the pristine village of Glenrothan surrounded by rolling inexperienced hills. After a blast of discordantly jaunty music, the movie opens with Sandy’s voice dictating a letter to his estranged brother Donal (Cumming), encouraging him to return to his homeland. Sandy’s well being is failing and he desires to see his kin. Donal, a nightclub proprietor in Chicago obsessive about the blues, has resisted going again to the land of lochs for causes that may change into solely considerably clear over the course of the run time. Plus, he’s having an excessive amount of enjoyable singing “One Meat Ball” to an enthusiastic viewers.
Donal finally relents, nevertheless, after his venue burns down in a handy plot gadget. So he joins his daughter Amy (Alexandra Shipp) and her younger baby on their journey. These two go to Sandy usually, having seemingly established a really shut relationship with him even if Donal has been out of contact at some stage in Amy’s life.
“Glenrothan” is filled with puzzling particulars like these, during which it looks like the script by David Ashton and Jeff Murphy is simply discovering lazy methods to get its characters all into the identical place. There’s a clunkiness that pervades your entire enterprise. The dialogue is especially picket and the actors wrestle by means of blended metaphors like, “Watch out on time, it could possibly creep up on you want a shitstorm.” That line is spoken by Cumming with zero irony.
The explanation why Donal has prevented this attractive place all of those years is teased out over a collection of heavy-handed flashbacks the place we be taught, basically, that his father was onerous on him and he was very near his mom, who died. There is no such thing as a surprising trauma in Donal’s previous, only a father who put numerous strain on him. All of it makes his habits appear petulant somewhat than rooted in some nice ache. Not that the townspeople, who deal with him like some type of true pariah, are a lot better.
All of the principal actors within the solid seem misplaced. Shipp is tasked with scolding her father and delivering leaden exposition. Cumming really solely comes alive when he’s singing. Blessedly, there are a few moments when the pure showman will get to croon and they’re essentially the most fulfilling. In any other case, Cumming has to externalize all of Donal’s emotions, because the screenplay has him talking out loud to himself as an alternative of letting him present his strife. Maybe the performer completed dirtiest is Mike Leigh and Kelly Reichardt veteran Shirley Henderson, enjoying Donal’s former greatest good friend and Sandy’s now proper hand. Too usually her character requires her to fall into hysterics.
Maybe most complicated is Cox’s obvious disinterest in his half, contemplating he’s the one which selected this materials. Perhaps he was relishing the prospect to play somebody with much more heat than Logan Roy, however Sandy is only a vaguely good man who Donal resented for a few years for causes which are unclear. Cox at the least will get to sneer the phrase “wastrel” sooner or later — the one beat the place you see a touch of what makes him normally such an exhilarating presence. (He additionally farts. So there’s that.)
As a director Cox additionally appears misplaced. Throughout a sequence during which Donal begins jamming with a band on the native pub, Cox doesn’t know the place to put the digital camera, fast slicing between fingers enjoying devices in a harried trend. Elsewhere the motion is statically staged. Cinematographer Jaime Ackroyd actually captures Scotland’s majesty, however there is no such thing as a character to the frames, which seem like they might be plucked out of a business from a tourism bureau.
By the top of the lugubrious 97 minutes any points the Nairn household had — as undeveloped as they’re — are neatly resolved. There’s much more humanity in show in an episode of “The Traitors.”
“Glenrothan” premiered on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition. It’s at the moment looking for U.S. distribution.
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