THE WIDOWER

Starring Shawn Milstead, Ramona Orr and Irene Miscisco
Written by Ed Kedzierski
Directed by Marcus Rogers
First Rites/Rogers Video

Whichever genre you’re toiling in, it’s safe to say that it’s every indie filmmaker’s wet dream for their movie to be hailed as a cult classic, a film that’ll be alluded to with fond memories in books and magazines until the end of time. The ugly truth, however, is that you can’t push for it; lofty sentiments such as this sort of have to happen on their own. This is precisely the problem with The Widower.

The film centers on the weird world of Milton Smythe, a sad sap willing to let nothing get in the way of celebrating his wedding anniversary…not even the death of his beloved wife. As her decaying corpse sits propped in their apartment, poor Milton spends his days enduring bizarre hallucinations, having imaginary conversations with his dearly departed, fending off intrusive phone calls from his panicked sister-in-law, and finally, running from the cops after his neighbor gets too nosey.

The Widower marks the feature-film debut of Marcus Rogers, a Vancouver filmmaker who cut his teeth on music videos and shorts with The Comedy Network. It shows. Much like his preceding efforts, The Widower is a flashy exercise with a few chuckles here and there, but it lacks substance. What halts it from becoming the type of film it so desperately wants to be (it doesn’t take a film school drop-out to see that this was meant to be Rogers’ Eraserhead, off-the-wall symbolism and all) is that it wears its soul on its face-there’s no mystery here, just forced eccentricity and calculated quirkiness. It’s not without intelligence, but it’s deficient of the honesty and innocence that could’ve made it an instant classic.

Clearly, The Widower is intended to be viewed as a comedy, but that shouldn’t be a guise from it going a tad deeper with the material (for a more sincere representation of the same idea, see Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy). As it is, the joke gets a little stale after awhile and the film drags like a cigar toward the end. While it’s an enjoyable enough romp with some clever bits that’ll have you laughing out loud, one wonders what The Widowe could’ve been had it taken itself a bit more seriously.

-Nathan Tyler