Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jenna MacMillan
Starring: Susan Kent, Jonathan Torrens, Dan Petronijevic, Emma Hunter, Kim Roberts
We all have that one friend who was great fun in their twenties but whose subsequent refusal to grow up became increasingly tedious as the years rolled on. In comedy movies such types are usually represented as a wacky fat bloke in a Hawaiian shirt who teaches the squares around him how to have a good time. In reality those suffering from arrested development are usually a burden on the people in their lives, always late with the rent because they're "between jobs" or just blew what little cash they had on a trip to Vegas. As such, there's always an element of victim blaming in comedies about man-children, which rarely recognise the toll dealing with an overgrown adolescent can take on their family and friends.
Canadian comic drama The Snake flips the gender dynamic. Rather than a fat bloke in a Hawaiian shirt, here we get a fortysomething woman in skintight lycra. But Jenna Macmillan's directorial debut falls into the same problematic trap of asking the audience to sympathise with its hot mess heroine rather than empathising with those whose lives she has made unbearable.
Susan Kent, who wrote the script, plays Jamie, a bottle blonde who dresses and behaves like an over the hill Mötley Crüe groupie. After being escorted home by the police for the umpteenth time, her long suffering mother Anne (Robin Duke) decides enough is enough and kicks her out of the family home. Turned away by her boyfriend Davey (Dan Petronijevic), a similarly immature rocker who lives in the back of his van, Jamie turns to her old friend Laura (Emma Hunter) for help. Laura is the exact opposite of Jamie, a middle class suburbanite with a steady existence, but she still reveres her old friend and her free-spirited ways. Much to the annoyance of her husband Steve (Jonathan Torrens), Laura insists that Jamie move into their vacant downtown loft. Initially repelled by her slovenly attitude, Steve becomes infatuated with Jamie, leading to the pair having an improbable affair.
With the sort of setup that has fuelled many a mumblecore indie, The Snake is ostensibly a "dramedy," but it never finds the right balance of drama and comedy. The cast is comprised mostly of veterans of the Canadian comedy scene, and the movie's more comic beats are played in broad bedroom farce fashion. As a result, when The Snake asks us to stop laughing and take things seriously it has a jarring effect. Jamie is such a broadly drawn archetype that it's difficult to take her seriously as a real person in whose plight we're supposed to invest. Jamie doesn't take herself seriously, so why should we? Within individual scenes the tone is erratic, and the movie never acknowledges the creepiness of Steve's pursuit of Jamie.
Jamie's mother is painted as the villain but the movie never extends an olive branch to examine just why she's reached the end of her rope with her daughter. We're supposed to root for Jamie's quest to find her grandmother's will and thus prove she has a legal right to occupy her family home, but Jamie is so narcissistic that most viewers will find themselves taking her mother's side. Regardless of gender, the overgrown teenager is a tired comedy trope that needs a fresher perspective than that provided by The Snake.
