If you want to spend time watching Alan Cumming traipse across the Scottish Highlands, I’d advocate any season of “The Traitors” on Peacock over the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition premiere “Glenrothan.” One among these items 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 forged, together with Brian Cox, who pulls double obligation as director.
The truth is, 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 chew of his finest performances to this activity. One would assume a person now most well-known for bellowing “fuck off” on “Succession” might need chosen a venture with a bit extra edge. As a substitute, “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 can develop 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 ultimately relents, nevertheless, after his venue burns down in a handy plot gadget. So he joins his daughter Amy (Alexandra Shipp) and her younger little one on their journey. These two go to Sandy recurrently, 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 stuffed with puzzling particulars like these, through which it looks as if the script by David Ashton 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 wood and the actors wrestle by means of combined metaphors like, “Watch out on time, it could creep up on you want a shitstorm.” That line is spoken by Cumming with zero irony.
The the explanation why Donal has prevented this beautiful 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 isn’t any stunning trauma in Donal’s previous, only a father who put a variety of strain on him. All of it makes his conduct appear petulant reasonably than rooted in some nice ache. Not that the townspeople, who deal with him like some type of true pariah, are significantly better.
All of the principal actors within the forged 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 probably 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 performed dirtiest is Mike Leigh and Kelly Reichardt veteran Shirley Henderson, taking part in Donal’s former finest pal and Sandy’s now proper hand. Too typically 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 way 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 very 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 through which Donal begins jamming with a band on the native pub, Cox doesn’t know the place to put the digital camera, fast reducing between fingers taking part in devices in a harried vogue. Elsewhere the motion is statically staged. Cinematographer Jaime Ackroyd definitely captures Scotland’s majesty, however there is no such thing as a character to the frames, which appear to be they could possibly 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 way more humanity in show in an episode of “The Traitors.”
“Glenrothan” premiered on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition. It’s at present in search of U.S. distribution.
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