FEW CANADIAN BUSINESSES have more richly earned a shoddy reputation than our indigenous film industry. Touted as the mirror of our identity and the high road to fortune for tax-shelter-happy dentists, it wiped out its investors, did little to define the nation and spawned a motley crew of deal makers who, if there were any justice, should have been circus barkers for freak shows.
In the mid-1980s, into this artistic abattoir arrived The Terry Fox Story, about the cancer-stricken amputee determined to cross Canada. The movie, much like Fox himself, overcame many seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Yet it may well have been the most artistically coherent, and certainly the most authentically Canadian, of the many weak attempts to make a film worthy of its subject.
Eric Fryer, who brilliantly portrayed Fox, was so believable, it hurt. At first, Fryer as Fox (in the movie, as in real life) ran alone, with no fanfare or support systems. The journey started with the simple ceremony of sticking his artificial foot into the Atlantic Ocean at Cape Spear in eastern Newfoundland. Doggedly, he began to hobble the eight thousand clicks home. In the harsh morning light, huddles of well wishers in tiny Newfie outports, as luminous as figures in Renoir canvasses, coalesced to wish him luck. There was a lame Patrick Watson, in a brilliant cameo, hobbling out to deliver an obscene but heartfelt benediction.
Inexorably and almost imperceptibly, Fox’s pilgrimage developed its own field of force. The kid started to draw crowds and media groupies. The movie’s pace took off when Fox was joined by Bill Vigars, a Canadian Cancer Society official (played by Robert Duvall). A noble-looking but uncompromising mentor with a devilish countenance, Vigars turned the lonely trek into a “Marathon of Hope.”
The film had serious flaws. The music, by Bill Conti, was bubbly elevator-style fluff, more suitable for afternoon TV soaps. What the film needed was some hard-edged, early Lightfoot or the evocative chants of Stan Rogers. The indoor lighting was poor throughout, and the first thirty minutes threatened to turn the film (literally) into a sleeper.
The Terry Fox of this movie was just an athletic kid given only six short months to live, wanting to make the best of it. The undeniable courage was there, but at first he couldn’t work up the nerve to break the news to his father that he intended to run across Canada. When his mother told her husband for him, the response was a flat and very Canadian “When?”
What raised the film beyond its pedestrian potential was the camera work of Richard Ciupka and the direction of Ralph Thomas. Ciupka captured subtle shifts in landscape and the differences of shadings of light as plot and character moved across the lanscape, from Newfoundland in spring to Ontario in deep summer. The wispy mists of dawn over a Quebec cornfield, the mauve shadings of twilight in the lush farmlands of the St. Lawrence Valley were less a backdrop than the movie’s dominant theme.
The country was playing itself, and it was a star. Every town was a landmark; the road became the movie’s narrative arc. There was an austere chill in the land across which Fox struggled—a parallel but very different texture from Ingmar Bergman’s tidy Sweden or Richard Attenborough’s teeming India. This was Canada, with its isolation and haunting potential, its dominant reality: an empty land filled with wonders.
By the time Fox approached Thunder Bay in what turned out to be the tragic end of his run, he was alone again, lost to the destinies that dominated his brief life. But alone or not, he became what he wanted to be, and in the last week of his trek, he pronounced his own epitaph: “ … Life is about reaching out to people—and having them touch you back.”
Terry Fox was determined to cross Canada “from telephone pole to telephone pole.” His interrupted ordeal is commemorated by this jewel of a film, which managed to suspend disbelief without romanticizing his odyssey.
— 1980