Kevan Funk (2016)
The Canadian writer-director Kevan Funk, whose first feature this is, makes his intentions clear from the start. Hello Destroyer is set in British Columbia, in the world of ice hockey, minor league. Tyson Burr has recently become a member of the Prince George Warriors. In the opening sequences on the ice rink and in the dressing room afterwards, the hand-held camera is close in, stressing the physically uncompromising nature of the sport, the macho power play at work on the rink and off it. The Warriors’ man of the match gets to wear and whoop around in a Native American headdress. Tyson and the other rookies are pinned down by teammates to have their heads shaved in a hazing ritual. The atmosphere is volatile, clamorous and threatening. It seems Kevan Funk is all set to explore the pathology of male competitiveness and self-assertion.
It’s no less obvious from the very start who the main character will be. In the dressing room, Funk quickly focuses on Tyson (Jared Abrahamson) and catches his reactions to what’s going on, whereas the hyperactive camera blurs the features of his teammates. We see immediately how competitive Tyson is. His face registers disappointment when he’s not the first player singled out for praise by the team’s coach, Dale Milbury (Kurt Max Runte); the award of the headdress trophy to Harper (Shane Leydon) is enough to rouse Tyson to josh Harper about his excess weight. In the scenes that follow, though, Tyson keeps himself to himself, saying little either to the other Warriors or in the house where he and a teammate Cody (Maxwell Haynes) are lodging with Wendy and Bill Davis (Sara Canning and Ben Cotton) and their young son. Perhaps, we think, Tyson, as a newcomer to professional sport, hasn’t yet learned how to balance imposing himself and playing on a team. The rare scenes where he’s more voluble or there’s a sudden change of tone understandably stand out. One night Tyson relaxes and confides to Cody at lights out his fear since childhood of the sound of silence. Suited up to attend some kind of reception for the Warriors, Tyson is flummoxed trying to tie a tie; Wendy has to do it for him and the unspoken sexual charge between them is palpable. (If Hello Destroyer had arrived on the scene sooner, this moment might even have merited a mention in Hannah McGill’s ‘Object Lesson’ on the movie tie in last month’s Sight & Sound.) Jared Abrahamson draws the viewer in. He has an expressive face. His distinctive cracked voice repeatedly takes you by surprise.
Once the pivotal event in Hello Destroyer occurs, however, the film dives. Tyson is an ‘enforcer’[1] for the Warriors. Fired by Coach Milbury’s win-at-all-costs exhortations (‘This is why we burn and bleed – to achieve greatness’) and stung by criticism that he’s not aggressive enough, Tyson overcompensates by grievously injuring an opponent. When Kyle Ridlowe (Brendan Byman) suffers bleeding on the brain as well as vertebral damage, Tyson is given an indefinite suspension from the Warriors and Bill Davis kicks him out. Increasingly isolated, the young man returns to his home town and moves in with his parents. Perhaps it’s possible – if so, it’s shocking – that an ice-hockey team’s management can make an individual player carry the can in such a case. (Serious injuries in this quasi-blood sport can’t be that unusual.) But the crude writing and direction make the callous ostracising and buck-passing incredible. In the first twenty-four hours after the incident, Tyson doesn’t receive any news whatever from the Warriors. (He discovers the extent of Ridlowe’s injuries from a television news report.) Milbury assures Tyson the club have his best interests at heart, as the club’s lawyer reads a statement for him to sign, a statement which amounts to an admission of sole culpability.
Back with his parents, Tyson shows no interest in keeping up to speed with the aftermath to the Ridlowe affair. This is simply the result of Kevan Funk’s loss of interest in that side of the story, which he puts on ice (sorry) until Tyson is summoned to a preliminary court hearing that triggers the movie’s climax. The hearing raises the possibility of criminal proceedings against Tyson. He drives back to his parents and, outside the house, commits suicide. He might as well have killed himself a screen hour earlier: like its protagonist, the film really has nowhere to go once he’s suspended from the team. Having complained a few days ago about the determined gloom of The Levelling, I now feel I was unfair to Hope Dickson Leach, whose work is atmospherically supple beside Hello Destroyer. Kevan Funk’s statement on the film’s website includes the following:
‘The culture of violence is maintained and sustained by passive societal approval in the form of indifference and ignorance, on a general level and among people in positions of power. … Systemic issues such as these are commonly hierarchical, something that this film is interested in examining, as well as the circular cycle [sic] in which these sorts of enabling attitudes and behaviors are predicated upon [sic].’
It’s hard to take that seriously but if he really did mean to examine such issues, Funk failed. He merely piles up illustrations of misery – so determinedly that the effect is sometimes almost comical.
Tyson gets part-time work in – guess where … a slaughterhouse. When not surrounded by carcasses and mopping up blood, he helps his father break up the derelict house that once belonged to Tyson’s late grandparents. Mr Burr (Paul McGillion) is coldly uncommunicative, except in a tirade that follows Tyson’s spending a night in the police cells: the father yells at length about the shame his sporting notoriety has brought on the family. (The parents’ feelings would surely be more complex than straightforward shame. In this small, ice-hockey-following community, wasn’t Tyson a local boy made good until his fall from grace? Isn’t the awfulness of what’s happened compounded by disappointment?) In spite of this, Tyson’s mother (Yvonne Vander Ploeg) seems kindly sympathetic towards her son. Because she is, Funk minimises her time on screen. Perhaps the most contrived piece of miserablism occurs when things appear briefly to be looking up for Tyson. He makes the acquaintance of Eric (Joe Dion Buffalo), an affable man who invites him round for a beer. Eric explains that his wife walked out on him but insists that you ‘gotta stay positive’. You wonder why, therefore, when Tyson mentions the house-clearing job, Eric asks what Tyson’s grandfather died from. (It’s not the natural question to ask in the circumstances: the answer could well be advanced old age.) You don’t wonder for long, though. Eric asks the question so that (a) Tyson can reply throat cancer and (b) Eric can recall in detail the gruesome condition of a man with throat cancer in the bed next to him when (c) Eric spent months in hospital, as a young child, after an accident that put him in a coma. A rare surprise of the film in its second half is that Tyson doesn’t top Eric in this me-too exchange with, ‘I’ve just put someone in a coma’. This scene is the last we see of Eric.
I know these strictures will cut no ice (sorry again) with cinéastes who consider film-making a matter of technique; credible character motivation and plot development – even when the story being told is set in a supposedly real world – as no more than means to the end of a visual and sonic composition. Hello Destroyer does have a particular look but Funk’s limited style draws attention to itself and away from the meaning of his images. Benjamin Loeb’s persistently dark cinematography ensures that plenty of those on screen remain literally obscure to the audience. Even when the light is sufficient, Funk and Loeb sometimes show a person in the foreground in soft focus or present them from some way away, through half-open doors. Funk’s camera pays more definite attention to a piece of dodgy plaster in a ceiling or a long crack in a wall – in other words, to things unequivocally bleak. The soundtrack is somewhat more eloquent. The explosions of noise – during, for example, Tyson’s bouts of lung-bursting physical exercise – are disturbing. Tyson’s fear of how loud silence can be is in your head whenever things go quiet, even though he doesn’t appear to register unease at these moments – until, near the end, when Funk actually turns up the volume of the silence, into a disorienting buzz.
I saw the film as part of the ‘Canada Now’ programme, showcasing ‘New Canadian Cinema in London’ at Curzon Soho. The administration of the audience feedback questionnaires was excellent! This isn’t something you can always say about special events at BFI, LFF etc but I’m sorry it’s the best I can say about the experience of Hello Destroyer. I don’t quite get the title but the writer-director’s surname so perfectly reflects his film’s severely depressed mood that, had I stayed for the post-screening Q&A with him, I’d have been tempted to ask if Funk was a pseudonym.
16 June 2017
[1] According to the online Free Dictionary, ‘An enforcer’s job is to deter and respond to dirty or violent play by the opposition. When such play occurs, the enforcer is expected to respond aggressively by fighting or checking the offender’.
