Cry in your beer
Old movies are littered with over-the-top villains, and Saddest's primary architect of doom is the vicious CEO of a Winnipeg beer company, Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini). Like a Leona Helmsley crossed with a Lon Chaney, the legless, sexually dominant Port-Huntley decides to boost her beer sales by staging an international contest to decide the world's saddest music. In her malevolent plan, the sheer profusion of heartbreaking melodies will send already dejected Depression-era Canadians running for the trouble-easing narcotic of the brewhouse.
In some of the film's funniest sequences, the contest of various nations outfitted in their regional costumes is presented as an Olympics-style sporting event punctuated by a ritual triumphant dunk in a super-sized keg of beer.
The Saddest Music contest also rekindles the warped, furious sibling rivalry between two Canadian brothers who have rejected their home country for the new ones of America and Serbia.
Wisecracking, sexually confident Broadway producer Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) is America in human form. With a name that evokes Yankee Doodle cigarettes and comic books, Kent has the outsized virility of Douglas Fairbanks and the quintessential native belief that a toe-tapping musical number can heal any woe. Kent's razzle-dazzle denial of unhappiness is in direct contrast to the gloomy pathos of his brother, Roderick (Ross McMillan), who has the arachnid morbidity of Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Haunted by the loss of his wife (Maria de Medeiros) and child, Roderick's fetishized grief has turned him into a hypochondriac with a litany of phobias, from wool to sunlight. In Maddin's over-the-top approach to heartbreak, Roderick keeps his dead child's heart pickled in tears in a jar he carries everywhere.
The Saddest Music contest is a hilariously ribald illustration of the foamy mania of cinematic sibling rivalry. But it's also a demonstration of the entire world's thirst for chug-a-lugged pathos. From the Serbians to the Siamese, all of the contestants work from the principle that their national sadness is the most exquisite. Wars have been founded on little more.
The only nation not drowning in self-pity is opportunistic America. Maddin's film is as telling a portrait of the nation's global reputation as Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Where other countries in the Saddest Music contest play folksy ballads of war and political persecution, the unapologetically vulgar Kent steals every marketable tragedy in American history, from slavery to lynching, to inspire his Broadway-style cavalcades of woe.
Maddin's delirious wit and boozy visuals beautifully replicate the wacky montages and dewy, world-in-a-snow globe look of silent film. But Maddin is not just a stylistic wunderkind hot-dogging on old-school aesthetics. Rather than simply parodying the conventions of the past, Maddin's drama pays homage to their exquisite, dreamlike power.
Saddest festers and broods with the furious intensity of vintage melodramas. But in Maddin's films, loss, jealousy and unrequited love are cranked up to their highest decibel. Maddin's films are about a loss so extreme, it approaches comedy.
In Maddinville, sadness is the foundation the entire world rests on. From the Mexican balladeer singing of funerals for babies to the poignant repeated cameos of a little blond child dead of mysterious causes, death is all around. Only an ability to laugh in death's face can save us.
Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com
