Film:  Canvas

Studio:    LMG Pictures

Director:  Joseph Greco

Principal Actors:  Joe Pantoliano, Marcia Gay Harden, Devon Gearhart

Release:  2006; On DVD released January 29, 2008

Film length:  101 minutes

Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements

5 Stars

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner

Canvas, written and directed by Joseph Greco, tells the story of the impact mental illness has on a family.  Even today, there have been few films willing to take on this issue and present it with realism and compassion.  A Bill of Divorcement (1932), starring John Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn, The Snake Pit (1948), starring Olivia de Havilland,  A Beautiful Mind (2001), starring Russell Crowe, and Proof (2005), starring Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow, come to mind.  Canvas certainly has earned a place in such company.

Mary Marino (Marcia Gay Harden, Academy Award winner for Best Supporting Actress in Mystic River, 2003) has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia sometime before the opening of the film.  Her ten-year-old son, Chris (Devon Gearhart) returns to his home in Florida after a fishing trip with his aunt, an excuse to send him away while Mary tries new medication to control her symptoms.  From the first, Mary's welcoming of her son home communicates emotions running loose, out of control, too much enthusiasm, too much concern.  Working at her canvas, she insists on painting a portrait of Chris at that first moment of homecoming.  Her husband, John (Joe Pantoliano, Emmy Award winner for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for The Sopranos, 1999) is seen early on in the role of combatant for his family, arguing over the telephone with an insurance company that refuses to cover Mary's medications and pleading with his boss for a raise to help with the mounting bills. 

All too soon, Chris realizes the troubled times he left behind when visiting his aunt are still very much a part of his home.  He wakes to the flashing lights of police cars, called because Mary is certain someone was prowling around the house.  "Did they check for footprints under the window?" she asks John, insistently.  When Mary charges onto the school bus in a panic, hugging Chris and asking over and over again if he is all right, he faces the ridicule of his schoolmates.  The nightmare comes to a head when he sees the police, called by a meddling neighbor, taking his mother away in handcuffs, and she is sent to a hospital.

Yet, Greco never lets the audience forget there is a person behind this mental illness, and there is a loving family throughout it all.  Chris picks up a seashell in his room, and placing it to his ear, hears the voice of his mother as she used to be, when they played on the beach near their home.  When, on a visit home, Mary asks Chris, "Do you remember me-before?" we know he does and loves her still.

John, too, is seeking the woman he fell in love with and, recalling their courtship on a sailboat, he begins to build a boat of his own.  In addition to the cruelty of other children's taunts about his mother, Chris now has to deal with jokes about Noah as his father works on the boat, attracting the attention of all the neighbors.  Pantoliano communicates fully the obsessive hope that completion of the boat will bring life back to the way it once was, that someday, his family will be sailing together over smooth seas.  Throughout, canvas -- in Mary's therapeutic painting, and in the wind-filled sails - carries the theme of freedom. 

Three outstanding performances by Pantoliano, Harden, and Gearhart, bring this story completely to life and communicate fully Greco's message that where there is love, there is hope, and where there may not be hope, there is still love.

Special features include commentary by Joseph Greco and behind-the-scenes footage.