You would never guess that Drive Back Home is writer-director Michael Clowater’s debut feature. From the opening frames until the picture’s tender climax, this felt like watching an Alexander Payne film. It’s part Sideways and part Nebraska as an unexpected road trip transforms into a path toward healing and redemption.
The story begins with the death of a patriarch. In a small town, everybody knows everybody, and there’s a kind of comfortable unease surrounding the event. For we all have a history, and we aren’t always saints. Charlie Creed-Miles plays Weldon, a quiet conservative plumber and son of the recently deceased. He lives a sullen, morbid existence, haunted by memory. And it is not long following his old man’s passing that he receives a call in the dead of night from a Canadian police officer informing him that if he doesn’t come and collect his wayward, gay, alcoholic brother, after being arrested for public indecency, he will be given prison time.
Grudgingly, and after being guilted by his mother, Weldon sets out before sunrise on a 900-mile trek to Toronto to bail out Perley (Alan C*****g). Perley, you see, has a history of getting drunk and getting caught in uncompromising positions, and his brother just can’t fathom why. After each time brings nothing but chaos in its wake, his brother refuses to relent or change. And now, whether they like it or not, they have 900 miles to drive back to New Brunswick to sort out all their personal and family issues.
“…Weldon sets out before sunrise on a 900-mile trek to Toronto to bail out Perley…”
It is here that the heart of Drive Back Home exists. As we watch these two men battle against the conventions and the compromises that landed them where they are. Both Perley and Weldon bear reminders of a dark and tumultuous event that has both literally and emotionally scarred them for life. Their personas are a projection, a shield of silence for one, and booze for another, so as not to tumble off down the rabbit hole, which leads to the root cause of all their unresolved sorrows.
At each stop along the road home, they taunt, test, and teach each other that who a person is is not exclusively connected to what a person is. In a society of ever-increasing labels, it’s interesting to see a film set in the 1970s dealing with the same stigma and stereotypes that continue to plague all those who identify as something different from what we consider social norms. The journey culminates as we learn the depths of the pain these brothers carry as they are almost stripped of all they possess, only to find the courage they never knew they had, and a love for each other that was clouded by draconian thinking and a loyalty to an ethos that now lies rotting in the earth.
Both C*****g and Creed-Miles are perfectly cast, and each plays their characters for all the rich and complex people they are. It’s their movie, and as beautiful a double-hander as one can find, and almost forlorn. Withnail & I. Clowater’s direction and script capture a story that is beautiful and brutal, ugly and illuminating, whilst conveying the gravity of being based on the filmmaker’s own family members.
Drive Back Home is very much 70s-style cinema recreated to perfection. The soft hues, the delicate composition, the great score, and the strong auteurist vision make this movie a timeless time capsule with a message of acceptance and love in our world that is yet to catch on.
"…...a timeless time capsule with a message of acceptance and love..."
Okay, this is about the dumbest thing I’ve seen today. Why is Alan C*****g’s name blanked out with asterisks? What weird parental-blocking software is doing that? It’s the man’s name.