The name is Owl, Grey Owl.
James Bond in buckskins and braids? The image seems preposterous at first. And the idea of Pierce Brosnan, the current screen incarnation of 007, playing a man who dedicated his life to saving the beaver sounds like one of those dubious double entendres from a Bond movie. But casting Brosnan as Grey Owl -- the grandiloquent fraud who became father of Canada's conservation movement -- is oddly appropriate. After all, Grey Owl, like Bond, is a romantic icon of the old school, an Englishman working undercover in an exotic land. Until his death in 1938, this "modern Hiawatha," as he billed himself, had fooled the world into believing he was a native half-breed, although he was really Archie Belaney from the English port of Hastings and did not have a drop of Indian blood in his veins. Like Bond, Grey Owl also left a trail of attractive women in his wake. And he had a weakness for alcohol.
Firewater, shaken not stirred.
Canadians often complain that their history lacks compelling heroes, but it would hard to find one more colourful than Belaney. Fulfilling a childhood fantasy of becoming "a red Indian," he moved from England to Northern Ontario at 17 and literally went native. He became a trapper, adopted an Indian lifestyle, wrote a series of best-sellers about his adventures in the woods and finally toured Britain in native regalia as a pop-star crusader for animal rights and forest protection. He was the world's first celebrity environmentalist.
And in this country of conflicting identities, he seems almost painfully Canadian.
Almost as soon as the man known as Grey Owl died in a Prince Albert, Sask., hospital on April 13, 1938, his many secrets began to emerge into the open air. That same day, The North Bay Nugget ran a story it had sat on for three years, revealing that the famous Indian naturalist was actually an Englishman named Archie Belaney. And not just any Englishman, it eventually turned out, but a binge-drinking bigamist who had had five "wives." His closest supporters, especially Lovat Dickson, the Canadian-born London publisher who had made Grey Owl a household name in Britain, were devastated. They were desperately worried that all the good Grey Owl had done the cause of conservation would now be interred with his bones. But the twists and turns of Archie Belaney's strange saga by no means ended with his death.
The life of Archie (Grey Owl) Belaney was an extraordinary masquerade.
Unfortunately, however, the filmmakers have packaged it as a love story, focusing on Archie's pivotal relationship with Pony, an urban Iroquois who discovers her native roots in the bush with a fake Indian. The irony is rich, the story compelling. But Pony (Annie Galipeau) is a whiny, irritating presence, the clichŽ of the headstrong yet helpless babe who trails the hero into the wild after he tells her it's no place for a woman.
Slow to catch fire, the narrative is mired in romance-novel courtship after Pony fall through the ice, Archie strips off her clothes to thaw her out. Then, as Pony persuades him to quit trapping, and they adopt two adorable beaver kittens, the drama is in danger of sinking into terminal cuteness. But to be fair, the beaver pets featured prominently in Grey Owl's books and films. And whenever the movie dips into sentimentality, screenwriter William Nicholson rescues it with comic relief.
Director Richard Attenborough, meanwhile, frames the saga with majestic images of the Canadian North. Pierce Brosnan plays the quietly tortured hero with a stong, subtle magnetism. And the drama, which starts so weakly, ends wonderfully -- there is a brilliant scene of Belaney in England visiting the two spinster aunts who raised him. Grey Owl is worth seeing. But it's a shame that such an unconventional hero receives such conventional treatment.
A man, a woman, the birds and the beavers
by Scott Feschuk
GREY OWL
It has to be said, so why not just get it out of the way: Grey Owl is beautifully photographed, gorgeous to look at, a real postcard of a picture.
These are the sorts of comments that are invariably employed as silver-lining syntax in reviews of well-meaning films set in the wilderness that attempt to deliver an important message but wind up proving so crushingly dull that viewers are tempted to perpetrate some form of environmental ill in an effort to gain vengeance.
Happily, such qualification is not required here. Grey Owl drags now and then, its cast members are frequently so earnest that they seem poised to burst into song, but it is, nevertheless, a fine bit of filmmaking and, more importantly, one heck of a good story.
Directed by Richard Attenborough, this is the tale of Archie Grey Owl -- or, rather, Archie Belaney -- an Englishman from Hastings who passed himself off as a half-breed among the aboriginal folk of the Canadian boonies and, in the 1930s, became famous in many parts of the world as the "Red Indian" who wrote and spoke passionately about the importance of saving the beaver and protecting the environment.
This ambitious film, written by William Nicholson (Shadow-lands, Nell), attempts to chronicle a good chunk of Grey Owl's story, although it focuses primarily on his life-changing relationship with Gertrude Bernard, nicknamed Pony and played by Annie Galipeau, an actress about whom Attenborough has spoken in glowing terms, but who nonetheless conveys the unease of an amateur player given too crucial a part in an epic production.
Pony, we're told, is a full-blooded Iroquois, but she has been raised in a town and knows squat about hunting animals or gutting a fox or any of that icky living on the land stuff. She meets Archie at a lodge, where he's amusing rich tourists with war dances and such, and swiftly falls for him, going so far as to follow ol' Grey Owl into the wilds for a long and lonely winter of trapping.
He, of course, wants nothing to do with her, until eventually he does. And it is Pony who ultimately persuades Archie -- and, through Attenborough's copious use of footage of baby beavers, perhaps some in the audience -- that there is no honour in trapping for money, that the land and its creatures must be protected.
Archie, already known in Canada and England for his magazine writing, pens a book relating this new-found belief, and it takes off as though it had been given the blessing of Oprah. In no time, he's giving lectures to sold-out halls throughout Britain while at the same time trying to shield his charade of a life from the curious eye of the public.
For a guy with a verb for a name, Pierce Brosnan is rather remarkable for his utter lack of dynamism. But at least he's clever enough to select roles in which a reserved demeanour is integral to his character (James Bond, for instance, or Thomas Crown). He plays Grey Owl as stoic, serene but also easily frustrated, and it's a compelling combination of traits. Brosnan does not have the chops to be a great actor, but neither does he seem to have contracted the need to try to dominate scenes by overplaying to emphasize his star stature. He seems to know and to have accepted his limitations, an invaluable asset for any performer.
Chronicling a life in a couple of hours is by now old hat to Attenborough, who directed Gandhi and Chaplin, and he once again crafts no shortage of memorable, telling scenes -- perhaps none better than the sequence in which Archie visits the bedroom of his youth, and we discover the roots of this man's fascination with Indian culture.
It is, of course, impossible to get a complete handle on Grey Owl from this film. Indeed, the picture at times seems to hint that it's presenting only a portion of the story (he's often seen drinking, but never shown drunk, for example).
But it certainly gets across the fact that this was a most unusual fellow who made the most of a most extraordinary lie.
Directed by Richard Attenborough
Written by William Nicholson
Starring Pierce Brosnan and Annie Galipeau
Classification: PG
Rating: **
Don't believe the title. There's not a single shade of grey in Grey Owl, and the ensuing whitewash turns a potentially vibrant story into an awfully pallid movie. And that's a shame because, properly handled, this is the sort of period piece that should have been packed with
contemporary resonance. After all, it tells the tale of a great impostor who minted an important truth out of his otherwise counterfeit persona. In that sense, it's a chronicle of celebrity and myth, and of how their interaction can yield a confusing alloy of fact and fiction. In these days of blurred ontological boundaries, what could be more modern than that?
Instead, alas, we're treated to yet another hagiography from Lord Dickie Attenborough, the windy director behind such whales as Gandhi and Chaplin and Cry Freedom. This time, his subject is Archie Belaney who, as a young Brit at the dawn of the century, sailed to Canada and went native with a vengeance -- befriending an Ojibwa tribe and mimicking (and to some extent mastering) their dress, their language and their skills. A few decades later, writing and lecturing under the name of Grey Owl, he was passing himself off as the real deal. His books sold, his celebrity grew, and, on an international stage, the impostor developed into one of the first true believers in the conservationist gospel, preaching with passion about the beauty of the land and the finite nature of its resources.
You might think that the owner of such a profound identity crisis would make for a compelling character -- a fascinating yet deeply conflicted fellow. Indeed, history confirms that Archie was more than a "fabulous artificer." He definitely had his dark side --drinking to excess, marrying several times, abandoning his own children. But virtually none of these shadings maketheir way into Attenborough's pastel portrait. Rather, the script picks him up in mature middle-age, where he's consistently presented as a pure and relatively untroubled soul, a noble faux-savage about to embark on his environmental mission. Since Pierce Brosnan is cast in the role, trading in his 007 finery for a headdress and braids, the conclusion is unmistakable: Seems that, out to save the planet from doom, Grey Owl is just Bond in buckskin.
Of course, even in moccasins, no self-respecting Bond is about to get introspective on us. So, in lieu of a character study, he's simply given a babe, a love interest known as Pony (Annie Galipeau). She follows Archie to his winter cabin and, looking up through enormous brown eyes, coos come-ons like this: "I love it when you tell me about the old ways." Apparently, he forgot to tell her about the perils of thin ice -- when the damsel plunges through a semi-frozen lake, our hero snowshoes to her rescue. Later, the happy couple adopt a motherless pair of beaver kittens, which become a cuddly symbol of their conservation message. Sadly, the symbol inadvertently expands when a topless Pony goes for a swim with her furry buddies -- Galipeau's performance is so wooden that we fear for her safety around the gnawing little tykes.
Meanwhile, Attenborough is transforming the Ontario and Quebec settings into a static series of picture postcards -- the pale pink glow of a Canadian sunset, the russet hues of an autumnal treescape, a carpet of virgin snow, a flock of returning geese. Through this circle of the seasons, Brosnan's Archie remains a serene fixed point. There's zero dramatic movement here, because his hoax is repeatedly portrayed as a benign ruse that offends no one -- not the maiden aunts who raised him back in England, not the native Canadians who benefited from his PR work, not the ambitious journalist eager for a scoop, not even his deceived girlfriend. Indeed, their forgiving response doubles as the film's major miscalculation: "What he was saying was far more important than who he was."
Well, that makes for a nice sentiment but a bad flick. In most pictures, and this one especially, "who he was" is the overriding question. As answers go, "an unmitigated saint" may stand upright but lacks a certain animation. Which brings us to an inescapable conclusion: Despite its good intentions, Grey Owl winds up doing an impeccable imitation of the Indian we'd all like to forget -- the one in the cigar store.
Toronto -- 'Am I a romantic? Oh my God yes," Richard Attenborough says, and he has the movie to prove it.
Grey Owl is a $45-million recounting of one of history's great impersonations, where a penniless Englishman came to Canada, darkened his skin, put on buckskin leggings and spent the rest of his short life calling himself Grey Owl.
When Archie Belaney, alias Grey Owl, died in a log cabin in Saskatchewan in 1938 he was a celebrated crusader for the rights of Indians and a defender of wilderness who could fill lecture halls in England and across North America. But then he was exposed, and his message forgotten.
It makes an exotic and tragic story, even if it's hard to imagine "the Chief" in the same class as other heroes who have inspired Attenborough films, notably Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin. But Attenborough, who was in Toronto last week to promote the film, begs to differ.
"I think he was a hero in that he trod an unpopular path," says the elderly filmmaker, who has the brightly lit eyes of a much younger man still looking for the next adventure. "He had a minutely minority view. He fought against open pit mining when nobody else did. One draft of the movie script talked about his political battle with the timber merchants who tried to drive him into obscurity."
Attenborough's idea is that Grey Owl's moment has come again, since the horrors of pollution and species extinction that he prematurely predicted have now come to pass. But the story is curiously told, to say the least.
There is, for example, nothing about timber merchants and open pit mining in the film. And there's very little about the Archie Belaney who drank too much and didn't support his children. The film dwells almost entirely on the sunniest six years of his life, between 1930 and 1936, when he met the woman of his life, Anahareo, and became a world-famous celebrity.
"But all that [other] stuff was too much to get into the script," Attenborough protests. "I learned that lesson with Charlie Chaplin: I got into a mess with wanting to tell all about this and that."
With Grey Owl he decided "to focus on the love story," and that's where he deployed his not-inconsiderable romantic instincts. For the title role he settled on the craggily handsome Pierce Brosnan, an action-film star who made his name as the latest incarnation of James Bond. For Anahareo he located a full-blooded native actress, the stunningly beautiful and unknown Annie Galipeau, who at the age of 21 had exactly two TV shows and a bit part in an obscure feature to her name. With a bankable male star and an exotic unknown, Attenborough had the classic ingredients of a blockbuster love story.
The calculation was so ruthless that it discomfited even Brosnan, who is no stranger to commercial films. He had hoped with the role of Archie Belaney, a bottomlessly complex man, to show his chops as a serious actor.
"I regret that we can't see a glimmer more of his alcoholic despair," Brosnan says. "I'd have liked a scene of him alone in his hotel room, shot through an empty bottle."
Before Attenborough contacted him he had never heard of Grey Owl, as befits an Irish actor born over a decade after Belaney's death. But Brosnan found the character captivating, starting with the fact that Belaney had been abandoned by his parents as a child and raised by relatives. This had been Brosnan's own story as well. He even sees a parallel between Belaney's decision to flee to Canada and his own decision to leave England and make a film career in America. "Belaney was fairly mangled emotionally. When somebody reinvents themselves they do it for a good reason."
Brosnan talks thoughtfully about the role, but his career has nonetheless been almost exclusively action TV and film, starting with Remington Steele back in the seventies. He said when he first received the script: "I thought it had come to the wrong actor." Why choose him, a Hollywood dweller for two decades, rather than one of the numerous great British character actors?
"Because it needed a physical actor," Attenborough replies, "and we don't have physical actors in the U.K. Not since [Laurence] Olivier, anyway. And the audience had to believe from the first moment that this is the man. He has to move like a panther. Like 007!"
Attenborough shipped a canoe to Brosnan in California and told him to get paddling. Brosnan got into the spirit of the thing, and also demanded a set of authentic Ojibwa snowshoes to practise in (he took them to Alaska). He even asked a woodsman, hired to eviscerate a deer on the film set, to show him how to do it. "It was a little hard to make the first cut," Brosnan says, with a wonderfully self-deprecating smile.
He is, in person, anything but macho. It's clear that this picture means a great deal to him, and he fusses about it. "It's been a shot in the arm for me. I admire Richard Attenborough, and for him to have the faith to give me this role . . ." He mentions that the hardest thing was playing Grey Owl's self-control, which sprang from his role-playing and the fear of being found out. "It's tricky playing with restraint. Maybe I used too much restraint."
Attenborough liked Brosnan's vulnerability. It reminded him of Belaney, who changed the story of his origins so often "that he sometimes got his [fake] accents mixed up."
When he was 11 years old Attenborough heard Grey Owl in person. London at the time -- it was the mid-1930s -- was possibly the most charmingly credulous imperial city ever known. Grey Owl's visit, recalls Attenborough, "was like the Rolling Stones today. A sensation. We had never seen a black face before. Even Asians were still an object of amazement. And this devil walked down the street in his buckskins!"
The fact that a native Englishman could be taken for "black" on the strength of windburn and a little skin colouring says a great deal about the simpler world of the interwar period. And Attenborough has, somehow, carried that innocence into extreme age. "I could listen to Richard talk all day long," Galipeau says. "He's so human and so pure. I love him like I love my uncles."
Attenborough manages to be both innocent and wily. He admits to being a romantic, but insists that he did his best to make the set of Gandhi look filthy and unappealing ("and yet it looked beautiful anyway. I blame Technicolor"). In the same vein, he says of Grey Owl that "we don't go on about the wives and booze but it's a reasonably frank piece."
This sparkling diffidence has let him carry on the epic filmmaking tradition long after its other practitioners have died or quietly stepped aside. But, just as Grey Owl raced from one speaking engagement to another knowing that his time was running out, Attenborough keeps on doing Technicolor magic for a public that has, perhaps, traded in one dream too many.
"I think it's an endearing, gentle movie," Brosnan says. "Whatever business it does, whatever critics it meets, it will always have poetry for me."
A few grey areas
By TYLER McLEOD
Like so many children of his time, Archie Belaney's played "Cowboys and Indians." He just never stopped playing. Belaney left his native England as a teen for Canada, where he lived out his days under the invented persona of Grey Owl. Grey Owl, opening today, is Richard Attenborough's interpretation of Belaney's life during the 1930s -- when he penned books as Grey Owl and toured the globe as an unofficial ambassador of North American aboriginals. The film has all the hallmarks of an Attenborough flick: Stunning scenery, historical settings, deliberate acting and a blatant political bent. Yet unlike Gandhi, Cry Freedom, Shadowlands or such, Grey Owl doesn't have much bite. This idealized Grey Owl, as portrayed by Pierce Brosnan, is a heroic leading man: Brave and strong, hardy enough to survive the cruel life of a trapper, yet sensitive enough to write novels.
He's the stuff of those Sunday night movies on CBS. No wonder Pony (Annie Galipeau) falls instantly for Grey Owl and follows him to his secluded winter sanctuary. An exhilarating young Galipeau makes the best of the one dimension the script allows Pony to exist in.
Ironically, city-raised Pony asks Grey Owl how she can reconnect with her Iroquois heritage.
And he is, in fact, enlightened in the ways of her people. Pony in turn affects Belaney. She chips away at his rugged exterior, showing him passion and compassion.
Grey Owl begins to use his renown as a great outdoorsman to preach a message of conservation.
His campaign to protect the Canadian wilderness eventually takes him back to England.
It is fortuitous Grey Owl chooses to present itself as a romantic epic, considering how Brosnan is, physically, unconvincing as someone with any sort of Native lineage.
Grey Owl is entertaining if you can suspend your disbelief enough for James Bond to saunter into a conference of treaty nation chiefs without drawing suspicion.
In reality, Belaney was an alcoholic and a bigamist whose delusional fantasies are likely referred to in a few modern psychology textbooks.
Attenborough glosses over such facts in the interests of promoting Belaney as the original eco-warrior.
Which is his prerogative, but he can't change the fact the story is most compelling when Belaney returns to England and we begin to get glimpses of his background.
The Oscar-winning director does manage to accomplish his goal along the way. You may not be entirely moved by the script's clumsy environmental statements, but they're infinitely more effective than Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground, anyway.
How Attenborough exhibits some of the most breathtaking portraits of Canadian landscapes ever committed to film is the true inspiration.
Grey Owl in the end may very well be the story of two Englishmen warning us to appreciate our resources.
Grey Owl a fascinating lone wolf
By LIZ BRAUN
Between Pierce Brosnan in braids and a pair of frolicking baby beavers -- really -- there is plenty to mock about the new Richard Attenborough biopic, Grey Owl.
On the other hand, this uneven but never boring character study is a truly fascinating look at one of the century's oddest ducks.
Archie Belaney was an Englishman obsessed by stories of the North American wilderness. Belaney was just 17 when he went to Canada, where he began to reinvent himself. Claiming to be half Apache, he called himself Grey Owl and took on the old ways of First Nations People, living in the wilderness, hunting and trapping, hiring himself out as a guide.
According to the movie Grey Owl, Belaney stopped hunting and became a passionate defender of animals and the environment through his marriage to an Iroquois woman named Gertrude Bernard.
Certainly, through his books -- still in print today some 60 years later -- and his famed lectures, Grey Owl became one of the first defenders of nature and an outspoken conservationist.
His secret, that he was not an Indian at all, did not come out until after his death in 1938.
Under the guidance of Attenborough, the Canadian wilderness is beautifully photographed and nicely decorated with period detail. Grey Owl tells Belaney's story via the hero's love for Gertrude Bernard, who was known as Pony. (She is the 'Anahareo' of GreyOwl's books.)
Capturing that period of the man's life also neatly captures his personal move into environmental concerns -- but leaves out some of the rough edges on the real Belaney, not to mention somewhat sapping up the script. However, as luck would have it, Attenborough cast Quebec actress Annie Galipeau -- who is part Algonquin -- in the role of Pony, and she carries the film nicely on her slender shoulders.
Brosnan, who looks a bit like the real Grey Owl, plays out the man's taciturn nature with no background backup. This at times leaves him behaving like the original wooden Indian. But Galipeau projects an innocence that keeps everything grounded and believable. Her performance centres all else.
Graham Greene, Nathaniel Arcand and Stewart Bickare also in the cast, as are British actresses Stephanie Cole and Renee Asherson, who play Grey Owl's aged aunties.
Grey Owl is an ambitious project, given the fact that the story could have been played out a dozen different ways. The film is a bit too smoochy for the adolescent boys who will thrill to the wilderness adventure element, and somewhat lacking in detail for the adult interested in the life of this complex man.
Still, Grey Owl is well worth seeing, and not merely because Pierce Brosnan looks so fetching in buckskins. That helps, though.
Sun Rating: 3 out of 5
An earnest ecology sermon
by Jay Stone
Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Annie Galipeau
Directed by: Richard Attenborough
Directed by: William Nicholson
Rating: PG
Playing at: Somerset, South Keys, AMC Kanata, SilverCity, Coliseum, Cinema 9
If Academy Awards were given out for good intentions,
Richard Attenborough's Grey Owl would be the hands-down winner
in the category of Most Earnest Film Biography. This well
meaning telling of the true life of Grey Owl -- an Englishman who posed for most of his lifeas a Canadian Indian and whose conservationist preaching helped rescue the beaver from extinction -- is filled with lovely scenery, sincere acting and a message about protecting the environment that is as important today as it was in the 1930s when Grey Owl himself was touring the world, an exotic in full head-dress, authentic buckskin and blue-eyed fervor.
Grey Owl also features an unexpected and muscular performance by Pierce Brosnan as the man who was born Archie Belaney in Hastings, England, and who transformed himself into a native whose skills at hunting and trapping were nonpareil. Brosnan, known until now as the charming and suave hunk who could impersonate Remington Steele or James Bond with equally shallow ease, demonstrates an inner fire we haven't seen before. When his Grey Owl returns to England to meet the King -- and to deliver yet another lecture about our fragile wilderness -- there is a scene where he returns secretly to his childhood home to visit the two old aunts who raised him. It is a quiet and moving sequence that gives us one of the film's few glimpses under the faked exterior of Grey Owl's impersonation and into the boyish heart within. Brosnan plays it with such a light touch that what could have been an embarrassing moment is quite stirring.
At the same time, however, it must be said that Grey Owl is just a tiny bit boring. The story, which sounds fascinating, becomes in Attenborough's hands something of a trek, albeit a scenic one. We come out having learned little more about Grey Owl than we might already know, but with many images of Brosnan paddling his canoe through Ontario rivers, scowling at those who would disturb nature and trying to look smitten with the unfortunately cast Annie Galipeau.
This Canadian actress plays Pony, an actual Indian from the city who falls in love with Grey Owl and follows him on his trapping expeditions to learn true native ways. The irony of this quest is never touched; Grey Owl doesn't want this woman with him, but he lets her run behind him while he tramps expertly through the fields on snowshoes, setting traps for beaver and fox.
Eventually, though, Grey Owl admits his love for Pony, and through her fondness for a couple of cute orphaned beaver kittens, learns that trapping is bad and that wildlife must be preserved. The baby beavers gambol on the lovers' bed by firelight in what looks like a parody of the genre; furthermore, hearing Galipeau's stilted delivery of such lines as, "I love it when you tell me about the old ways," give much of the film the air of some outdated National Film Board educational video.
Nor do we learn much about the drive that brought young Archie Belaney from Hastings and into the hard life of an authentic native trapper. There are hints -- he loved the story of Hiawatha and all things native as a child -- but the film begins near the middle, when Grey Owl is already accepted as a native and one of the finest outdoorsmen in the country.
Everyone has bought his myth that he is the son of a Scottish father and an Apache mother and, with true convert's dedication, he has become one of the few people to keep alive the old native ways.
Those ironies are also left behind in Grey Owl, however. Attenborough, a film-maker of very conventional passions, is more interested in making a film about environmental issues than about the inner workings of a man who lived a fantasy for his adult life. Nor is there an examination of Belaney's darker side -- his many wives, his drinking problems -- that would have made the portrait more complex and interesting.
After Grey Owl's conversion, the film becomes a series of lessons in wildlife management as Archie is hired as a sort of spokesman for the federal parks department, sent to live in a government-built log cabin in Saskatchewan and to fight for the endangered beaver in both lectures and best-selling books.
Aside from the scenery, this isn't a very visual concept. The drama in the film comes in the still bubbling love story between Grey Owl and Pony.
Grey Owl was written by William Nicholson, who also scripted Attenborough's Shadowlands, and the imagined dialogue here could have been lifted from that melodrama. (Pony: "Do I have to do it all? All the loving and all the leaving?") Surrounded as it is by carefully recreated native rituals and Brosnan's painstakingly learned wilderness skills, it stands out as so artificial as to threaten the credibility of the whole film.
That's too bad, because when Brosnan's Grey Owl stands before an audience and says, "We're not the lords of this earth. We're its children," you can feel the depth of well-meaning behind the project. Grey Owl is a difficult life story that has been turned into an ecology lesson. We're left wondering, If the baby beavers weren't cute, would Grey Owl still be killing them?
Movie spreads Grey Owl's message
by JOHN MCKAY
TORONTO (CP) - It began with the braids. Actor Pierce Brosnan, whose debonair screen image is more in line with Remington Steele and James Bond, was worried at first about tackling the role of Grey Owl.
"Wearing braids can be pretty daunting. How the hell am I going to look as this guy?" Brosnan says he asked himself about playing the Englishman who passed as a conservation-minded aboriginal in the1930s.
Grey Owl is the new $45-million movie directed by Richard Attenborough and filmed on location last year in Canada and England.
"So I lived with them (the braids) for three months, I had them in for nearly six weeks before filming, and that automatically makes you walk and feel and move in a different way."
Then he listened to tapes of Grey Owl's voice, although he says he wanted to create his own in his head, instead of copying the real thing.
But an even bigger challenge was to find a place in Malibu, Calif., to practise walking in snowshoes and paddling a canoe, something second nature to Grey Owl.
A break came when he had to go to Alaska to take part in a tribute to another notorious environmentalist, Paul Watson.
"There's snow in Alaska, I brought them up and my first introduction was a 10 k hike in snowshoes. Luckily I'm fairly physical."
Brosnan didn't know anything about Grey Owl until he was offered the part. Then he read everything.
The man's real name, of course, was Archie Belaney, a disaffected Englishman who, early this century, came to Canada to fulfil a childhood dream of playing at being a "Red Indian." Eventually he fixed on environmental issues long before they were trendy, particularly the destruction of the beaver and the forests.
He became a world celebrity - perhaps the most famous Canadian of his day - writing books and making lecture tours of England in war bonnet and full aboriginal dress. Only after his death in 1938 was his true identity revealed.
Back in 1935, one of Grey Owl's fans was 12-year-old Attenborough, who later directed such classics as Gandhi and Cry Freedom and acted in the Great Escape and Jurassic Park.
Attenborough recalls how he and his brother lined up for hours in Leicester to hear a lecture and to get a book autographed. He remembers the sheer drama of the performance as the lights dimmed, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata played, and a spotlight shone on this magnificent, stony-faced figure. "He was a sensation. He was like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones rolled into one. People queued forever."
Attenborough's memory of the event is relived with precision in one sequence of his picture.
And the ebullient, white-bearded filmmaker offers no apologies for glossing over the historical record. No mention is made of Belaney's alcoholism or bigamy - he married and abandoned several women.
In the film, Grey Owl falls in love with a young Iroquois named Pony (played with charming innocence by fledgling Quebec actor Annie Galipeau.) It is Pony who fires up Grey Owl's concern for the environment.
"I made a balls-up with a picture called Chaplin," Attenborough says. "I attempted to put too much into it, and I decided this time that I really wouldn't make that mistake again. We decided THE moment in his life was when he discovered the love of his life."
Galipeau, who is part Algonquin, says the First Nations people saw not an impostor but the sincerity of Belaney's message, and she hopes moviegoers get it.
"I remember when I was a kid, my grandfather talked about Grey Owl. He was a hero," she says. "We're going to make the people sensitive about what's happening. It's wonderful."
Following Grey Owl's death, it was the fraud that captured the world's attention, not his message. Then, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was largely forgotten.
"Now, of course, the cause that the young people evince in Europe. ..are the Greens, the preservation of the planet," says Attenborough.
Brosnan agrees the message was found again in the '60s.
"It took the whole hippie movement and that era of celebration of peace, love and no war, to find this man on the landscape again."
Some facts on Grey Owl, the Richard Attenborough film that opens theatrically Oct. 1 and distributed in Canada by Remstar Entertainment:
Producers: Beaver Productions and Transfilm (Richard Attenborough, Jake Eberts, Claude Leger)
Stars: Pierce Brosnan, Annie Galipeau, Graham Greene.
Screenplay: William Nicholson.
Plot summary: An alleged aboriginal, Archie Grey Owl,
captures the fancy of Pony, a young Iroquois, and she follows him
into the wilderness. They fall in love, marry and she infuses him
with a concern for the environment. Archie then embarks on a global
campaign of awareness, writing books and lecturing in England,
secretly his native country.
Location shoots: North Hatley and Chelsea, Que., and England.
Quote: I grew up on cowboys and Indians. I had this wonderful opportunity to go off and work in the company of Indians and to play a man who believed he was one. But wasn't." - Pierce Brosnan.
Flying low: Grey Owl has all the ingredients to make a fascinating tale, but somehow the movie never takes off
by BRENDAN KELLY
There isn't much good news to report on Grey Owl, so let's start on an upbeat note. Pierce Brosnan, who many figured was an odd choice to portray the Englishman-turned-Indian, is quite good in the title role.
The Irish actor's piercing blue eyes are explained in the script by the fact that he's pretending to be half-native, half-Scottish, and the man best known as Bond, James Bond, has the charisma that's key for the part of a charlatan who mesmerized so many people. As for the other people associated with the project, let's just say this is not an artistic high-water mark for producer-director Richard Attenborough or screenwriter William Nicholson. Their last collaboration, Shadowlands, was a touching, nuanced love story, but they stumble big time in their attempt to capture the life and times of the extraordinary man who was Grey Owl.
The real mystery is how they could take such an intrinsically intriguing story and make it seem so mundane. Because the raw material is nothing if not fascinating. Read the cover story about the real-life Grey Owl in the April-May issue of the Canadian history magazine The Beaver and you come away completely captivated by the tale of this maladjusted fellow, Archibald Belaney.
Belaney, originally from Hastings, England, set sail for Halifax at the age of 18 in 1906 and soon reinvented himself as the "red Indian'' he used to pretend to be in his yard back home in England. Archie Grey Owl was a hard-drinking, fairly unbalanced guy who married and ditched women with frightening frequency. This strange character became a celebrity of rock-star proportions in Canada and England in the 1930s by delivering a strong environmental message years before it was trendy. It's not hard to see why Attenborough thought this was the stuff of a great movie. Unfortunately, he hasn't made that great movie.
The film focuses on the relationship between Grey Owl and the young Mohawk waitress Anahareo, or Pony (Annie Galipeau), who is immediately enamoured of this striking "native" trapper.
Against his express wishes, Pony follows him into the bush up north. At first, things don't look promising, but romance blossoms after Grey Owl rescues Pony when she falls into a half-frozen lake.
She frowns upon his trapping and hunting, and is continually nagging him to give it up. Not surprisingly, he isn't impressed by her save-the-animals arguments.
But Grey Owl has a change of heart after he and Pony become attached to a couple of beaver babies. This is pretty well the central plot development, the moment that thrusts Grey Owl on to the path of environmental crusader, and it's absurdly hokey. That two little cutesy creatures would suddenly transform this tough trapper into a mushy animal-rights activist simply doesn't ring true.
The most successful section of the film chronicles his return to England as a celebrity late in his life. The scene where he visits his childhood home in Hastings and, for the first time in decades, meets the two aunts who raised him (wonderfully portrayed by Stephanie Cole and Renee Asherson) is remarkably poignant - and hints at the dramatic possibilities in this story.
Another dilemma is the lack of a satisfying explanation for Belaney's off-beat life choices. At one point, Archie tries to explain to Pony why he decided to impersonate a native Indian, but we're left with little sense of Grey Owl's motivation.
One of the weakest links is Brosnan's co-star, Quebec newcomer Galipeau. The young actress is not up to the task at hand and she mostly looks wide-eyed and confused. She delivers her lines in wooden fashion and there is little on-screen chemistry between her and Brosnan.
Grey Owl does look great. Director of photography Roger Pratt has done a top-notch job of lovingly shooting the colourful landscapes of rural Quebec and every effort has been made to re- create the look and feel of the era.
Too bad Attenborough and Nicholson didn't pay the same sort of attention to the psychological details of the story.
Grey Owl
Rating two (two stars)
Grey Owl is playing at the Angrignon, Brossard, Cavendish, Centre Laval, Paramount and Pointe Claire cinemas.
Parents' guide: some themes might go right over kids' heads, but basicallyit's for all but the very young.
Touched by Grey Owl
Director Richard Attenborough, as a boy, met the real Grey Owl. He tells Jay Stone about his movie portraying his inspiring 30s idol.
By Jay Stone
Montreal --There is a sequence in Richard Attenborough's film Grey Owl in which the Canadian Indian -- who was really a transplanted Englishman named Archie Belaney who impersonated a native for most of his adult life -- returns to England for a grand lecture tour. Dressed in his native outfit, Grey Owl causes a sensation in the streets of London and in the lecture hall, where he brings a message of conservation for which he became famous.
It's a sequence that has a special authenticity. Richard Attenborough knows, because he was there. He met him.
"Just," Attenborough acknowledged in an interview here at the start of a cross-Canada tour to promote the film, which opens today. "Like thousands of others. I touched him and shook his hand. And got him to write Grey Owl in his book."
It was in 1935, when Attenborough, now 76, was a 12-year-old schoolboy who played cowboys and Indians in the fields near his Leicester home. Grey Owl was an impossibly exotic figure in those pre-war days of 1935.
"It's very hard to believe and accept," Attenborough said. "We'd never seen a coloured face. We didn't see a black face until the war, when the American troops came over. There weren't West Indians or Africans in the U.K. There weren't, in any number, Asians. So when this guys walks down the street in buckskin, let alone the bloody great war bonnet that he had, he stopped the traffic. Bus drivers crashed to a halt. They'd never seen anything like this. They couldn't believe that such a person was walking the streets."
Attenborough said he stood in line with his younger brother, David, to see Grey Owl's lecture, then waited another two hours to get him to sign the book. It was an important moment for both brothers: David was on the road to becoming a famous nature photographer, and Richard was on the way to becoming an actor, then a director who specialized in film biographies.
I loved the theatricality of it, the costumes and the feathers and all that stuff. But Dave, right from this high (indicating a little boy's height), cared about, was fascinated by, natural life, as it were, nature and so on. When I told him that I had rediscovered this subject as a possible movie, he went out of his mind with excitement. 'Sod,' he said. If you think you're getting the book back, you're making a mistake. Possession is nine parts of the law and it's on my bookshelf.' "
Movies are more Attenborough's line anyway. The Academy-award-winning director, the son of a university college principal, quit school at 17 to attend acting school, then served for three years in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
Although he says not attending university is his biggest regret in life, it led to a career where he says he can best express his interest in the concept of heroism.
"I tell stories about men and women who I find heroes.We're short of heroes."
They include Gandhi, the subject of Attenborough's 1982 film, which won him a Best Director Oscar, as well as Charles Chaplin, Young Winston (Churchill) and now Grey Owl.
The love story takes place between Grey Owl (played by Pierce Brosnan) and Anahareo, also known as Pony, his wife, played by the young Canadian actress Annie Galipeau.
Brosnan was Attenborough's first choice for the role. The director knew the Irish-born actor from the British theatre, before he became famous as Remington Steele on television and James Bond in the movies.
"He's a professional actor and a bloody good one," Attenborough said. "Firstly you needed somebody who was an imposing figure, six foot something, with a profile that could be acceptable, with a brown skin, as a half-breed.
"But he's also, ironically, other than Sean (Connery), one of the very few physical actors in the U.K. Olivier was a physical actor. Guinness isn't. Redgrave isn't. Richardson wasn't. O'Toole to a certain extent. But there are very few physical actors. You needed someone who could ƒ I mean, the premise of the story is this man lives 300 miles north of Montreal, alone in a cabin, tends for himself, kills his food, uses the skins to cover himself, and is credible in living in that degree of isolation. He needs to have ƒ I mean, Pierce moves like a panther. And he is a very hard worker." Brosnan trained to learn Grey Owl's wilderness skills, such as paddling a canoe and throwing a knife. He practised snowshoeing on the sands of Malibu so he could get it right. He didn't come across, as Attenborough put it, as "a prissy-assed movie star who was not going to get down to work." "I always remember, one of my heroes -- and I'm a guy who has heroes-- was Edward G. Robinson. Does he mean anything to you? I made a film with Eddie in 1943. I was learning to act, and he said, 'Richard, you must never come on the set with the requirement of forming a characterization. You must arrive on the set with the character in your blood, flesh and bones. What you present on the set is the circumstance in which that person exists, whether it's danger or happiness or whatever. There isn't time in your head and your mind to do it later.' " Attenborough learned the skills well enough to create a career not only as an actor, producer and director but also as a broadcaster who helped establish Britain's first independent radio station and its Channel 4 Television. Diminutive, bearded and twinkly enough to be cast as Santa Claus -- he was, in fact, in a remake of Miracle on 34th Street -- Attenborough is both a knight and a Lord (Lord Attenborough of Richmond-upon-Thames, in fact), as well as a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, a recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize, chancellor of Sussex University and much more. He was involved with the late Princess Diana in the battle to ban land mines, and he speaks highly of the "courage" of Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy in spearheading that fight.
He credits some of his social activism to his parents, who helped rescue Basque orphans during the Second World War and were instrumental in establishing the Kindertransport of 10,000 Jewish children from Germany. His parents adopted two German Jewish girls during the warb to help them escape from Naziism.
They asked us (Richard, David and youngest brother John) if we would accept them as part of the family. I was 15. It was an extraordinary thing for them to do."
The brothers agreed, and the girls became half-sisters to the Attenborough boys.
James Bond's alter-ego, Pierce Brosnan, steps uncomfortably into role of Canadian legend
By Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star Movie Critic
By the time it clasps yours on the 23rd floor of the Four Seasons Hotel, Pierce Brosnan's hand feels like it started somewhere over Lake Ontario. This is a handshake with velocity and momentum, the kind that throbs for a while afterward.
It's a handshake that says ``I'm a regular guy who just happens to be drop dead glam,'' but it also says ``dick with me and I could pitch you screaming out that window.'' Either way, it leaves an impression.
Brosnan has arrived in Toronto, a city he's only visited once before (in the pre-Bond, even pre-Remington Steele dark ages) to help promote Grey Owl, a movie in which the 46 year-old Irish-born actor (and the most commercially successful James Bond of them all) plays Archie Belaney, the curious English chap who became an international celebrity during the Depression when he dressed as a ``Red Indian'' and went to bat for the endangered Canadian beaver.
Brosnan is not dressed for such activity as he flops couchward in the suite. His suit is black, and his shirt - opened sufficiently at the collar to permit escaping tufts of salt-and-pepper chest-hair - is a rich blue. Although promotional material surrounding Grey Owl stresses how quickly the L.A.-based Brosnan took to canoeing, one doubts it was in an outfit like this.
As un-Brosnanlike as the Archie Belaney story sounds, the actor is only sitting in this very room at this very moment because Lord Richard Attenborough, the Academy Award-winning director of Ghandi - which featured Ben Kingsley impersonating an east Indian - was as determined to make a movie of Grey Owl as he was to have Brosnan in it.
He waited years for Brosnan, whose mid-career catapult to A-list superstardom as the current Bond, happened to coincide with Attenborough's growing interest in making Grey Owl.
Ultimately, for Pierce Brosnan, it boiled down to a choice between Bond or Belaney, the beavers or the babes. So guess who wound up on the back burner?
But Lord Attenborough waited, as Brosnan was the first and only actor up to task of bringing Archie, or at least Richard Attenborough's Archie, to the screen.
``The first actor that I thought of was Pierce Brosnan,'' Lord Attenborough has said. ``In the latter part of his life, Grey Owl had to take to the stage when he was lecturing to huge audiences, and Pierce can do this brilliantly as a classically-trained Shakespearean actor.''
The classically-trained Shakespearean actor with the killer handshake is tired this afternoon, and one suspects it's not just because he was up half the night, as he claims, ``with four women friends.''
It might also have something to do with the fact Brosnan has only recently finished doing international promotion for The Thomas Crown Affair, and because he's mere weeks away from doing it all over again for his third Bond, the Rupert Murdochishly-named The World is Not Enough.
He has, in other words, been spending an inordinate amount of 1999 crushing the hands of journalists in strange hotel rooms. You'd be tired too.
Nothing if not professionally friendly, the only indication Brosnan might prefer to be elsewhere comes through in a certain drift in his conversational trajectory, a tendency to float off, mid-thought, somewhere just beyond the 23rd floor window. But he always drifts with a smile. A smile that says, ``Throw me a rope, for god's sake, for I've forgotten what I'm talking about.'' Or maybe, ``Help me out here before I break your hand.''
Over the course of our 30-reduced-to-20-minute interview, in which we range (at his behest) from the legacy of oppression binding the Native Canadian and the Irish to his plans to do ``at least two more'' Bonds (he's only ``just getting the hang of it''), only one line of inquiry punctures the atmosphere of genial superficiality.
It's when I ask him why the Archie Belaney he plays on screen, an Archie who is dashing, romantic, heroic and effortlessly charismatic, is so, well, different from the Archie of history: A boy from Hastings who spent his life playing Indian in theCanadian wilderness. An alcoholic bigamist who seemed far more concerned about the plight of beavers than providing for his own children.
In Attenborough's movie, on the other hand, Archie is a romantically charismatic saviour of the Canadian wilderness, a visionary conservationist whose only fault is a certain dullness - a dullness which may well be the byproduct of certain shortage of faults, the dullness of saintly perfection.
A fantasy figure who, like Superman or Tarzan, a boy mightconsider heroic, but who also qualifies as a little, you know, odd.
``He's a much less dark character on screen than he was in real life,`` I offer gingerly. ``Not quite as complex.''
Brosnan sighs. ``Yes he is, and he will stand or fall by that. I think the alcoholism was . . . well, I regret not seeing that.''
After another long sigh, Brosnan resumes. ``There's only so much you can put in a film and I think Richard had been once bitten, twice shy when he did Chaplin. He put the whole kit and kaboodle in there, and he was criticized for it, and hesaid `Well I don't want that to happen again.' So he picked a spine of Archie's story, which is the love story of him and his wife Pony.''
Without prompting, Brosnan begins to express his misgivings about Grey Owl, and particularly about the movie that could have been made but wasn't, a movie about something the man known to the world as James Bond might understand all too well: The impossibility of living up to the role you find yourself cast in, the contradiction between oneself as a character and as a person.
Discussing Attenborough and screenwriter William Nicholson's determination to focus on one aspect of Grey Owl's life at the expense of all others - an aspect which is itself highly fictionalized - Brosnan adds, ``You lose out Archie's experience of the war, you lose out the demons of the booze and you lose out the bigamy and all the women he had in his life.
``He was a scallywag. He was a rogue.''
Asked if he missed rendering these rich but unheroic aspects of Grey Owl's personality, Brosnan is uncharacteristically quick to respond.
``I certainly miss the booze aspect, and I kind of kick myself there.''
Thoughtfully pinching a crease in his trousers, Brosnan starts reflecting on the Archie Belaney you sense he might liked to have played, but who got lost somewhere in the translation from history to family entertainment.
A man trapped by persona, a man better known for the character he played than the person he was. A man the guy who plays James Bond might feel a certain affinity for.
``You know,'' Brosnan muses aloud, ``to be suddenly touched by the limelight, and he was touched by it greatly, and transformed into this heroic movie star . . . He was the ultimate actor in some regards.''
Brosnan, who toiled for years in TV and B-movie limbo before going suddenly global as Bond, is imagining what the real Archie Belaney's life must have been like.
The life, it should be stressed, the movie Grey Owl largely omits.
``But then to go home,'' the actor continues, ``take the headdress off, take the buckskins off and be in some hotel in Liverpool, face to face with yourself in the mirror.
``Looking through the empty bottle and knowing you're a lad from Hastings . . .''
This aspect of Grey Owl's life obviously fascinates Brosnan, and there's clear regret in his voice that it isn't part of the movie he's ostensibly sitting across from you to sell.
Still pondering the crease on his leg, the actor continues imagining the inner life of Archie.
``No matter how much you believe in yourself, you know you're a fraud. You know you aren't what you say you are. How that must twist you in some way.''
Leaving the room with a slightly less vigorous handshake than the one he arrived with, Brosnan is ushered off for the next interview.
Eventually he'll settle in a hotel room himself, perhaps even get a little rest before having to face the world in a disguise even more famous than Archie Belaney's.
Next time we see Pierce Brosnan, he'll be buried somewhere beneath James Bond.
The War in the Persian Gulf, an Englishman posing as a native Canadian and a pair of smartass highwaymen in 17th-century England. These are the subjects of three movies hitting screens today, and not the kind you watch in the dark.
I'm talking about the screen of history, which each of these movies - Three Kings, Grey Owl and Plunkett & Macleane - collide with from strikingly different directions.
Three Kings, David O. Russell's bravely irreverent movie about Bush-league sport in the Persian Gulf, begins where history customarily leaves off. The first title you see before plunging into the party-hearty mayhem of post-Desert Storm Iraq - which Russell depicts as a frathouse keg party with heavy artillery - is ``The war is over.''
A story about living in the mindwarping vacuum between official history and unofficial reality - a desert if ever there was - Russell's movie couldn't have picked a better site for launching a satirical assault on the corruption of truth in the era of into management. If ever there was a conflict that seemed staged for the benefit of pleasing sponsors, it was the high-concept showdown with the blockbuster moniker of Desert Storm.
In Russell's movie, the director's first studio gig following two winningly anxious sex comedies (Spanking The Monkey and Flirting With Disaster), a disparate group of Yankee malcontents - Special Forces Captain Archie Gates (George Clooney), Captain Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Sergeant Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) and the sociopathic good old boy Private Vig (Spike Jonze) - commandeer a Humvee and strike out toward the parched horizon in search of one of the movies' most enduring metaphors for the rot of the human spirit.
Equipped with a map pulled from the buttocks of a surrendered Iraqi soldier, Gates and company go for the gold: Saddam's hidden stash of Kuwaiti bullion, a fortune for the taking by four guys who think the spoils of war ought to amount to more than a ratings bonanza for CNN or a public relations bonanza for the Bush administration.
Shot on overexposed Ektachrome stock, Three Kings has the bleached, bone-white look of something left in the sun too long: It feels like you're watching it through a filter of dreamy disorientation, as though you've just crawled from a dark hole in the ground onto a the world's largest solar heating panel. At first the shape of things, and even your spatial relation to them, are hard to make out, and it's hard telling what's real from the product of optical stress.
As a visual metaphor for abrupt enlightenment - a theme Russell characterizes as the gradual realization that there's much more going on in the Gulf than these go-for-it GI's had the foggiest notion of - the dusty aftermath of Desert Storm is almost poetically apt.
As their Road Runner-like desert pursuit of Saddam's gold draws them further from reason and military-issue history, as they find themselves dodging bullets exchanged between Saddam's army and the democratic uprising the Americans are about to leave to slaughter, Gates and company find themselves on a kind of odyssey of recovered awareness.
They emerge from the protective bubble of myth and policy - the same bubble which keeps them from getting killed while civilians are shot around them - and decide to act on the basis of, of all dangerously unofficial ideas, morality.
Believing that, as Gates puts it, Bush ``lied to these people,'' Russell's team of renegades dedicate themselves to spiriting a few hundred otherwise doomed Iraqi civilians over the border to Iran. In the process they're not only defying Saddam and American policy - which has stated that the Americans are to leave well enough alone now that, as that opening title put it, ``the war is over'' - but history itself, or at least the version of it which claimed that the war ended when Bush and CNN said it did.
It went on, out of range of news cameras and public interest, even while the rest of the world moved on to other pressing matters: the Super Bowl maybe, or Late Night With David Letterman.
Although marred marginally by overcrammed plotting (some of the movie leaves you as disoriented as the guys in it) and a too heroic, Hollywood-issue conclusion, Three Kings remains a mostly remarkable achievement: For its wily dismantling of the ``official'' Desert Storm, for its technical and generic audaciousness (in its way, this is as radically unconventional a war movie as Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line), but mostly for its exposure of the dangerous relativity of what currently passes for ``history.''
Three Kings is a movie about people who, by inadvertently pricking the bubble of accepted reality, realize for the first time that they're actually living in it.
In this understanding of history as a structure, as a means of organizing random events into a narrative serving particular interests, Russell's movie takes as subject what movies like Grey Owl and Plunkett & Macleane take for granted, and in so doing has more to say about history than either of these movies.
While the story of Archie Belaney - the Hastings-born Englishman and pioneering conservationist who became a Depression-era celebrity while posing as a Canadian half-Apache named Grey Owl - would seem foolproof movie fodder, Richard Attenborough's movie of Belaney's life merely proves that sometimes nothing seems more false than truth tailored to suit convention: a bogus account of a bogus life, Grey Owl is fakery squared.
Starring the impossibly handsome Pierce Brosnan, resplendent in Last Of The Mohicans-style braids and buckskin, as a kind of Canadian Tarzan of the Beavers, the movie actually manages never to strike anything resembling an authentic note.
For Attenborough, it would seem, history is less a springboard than a trampoline. And just watch the guy jump.
From the mannequin-perfect good looks of Brosnan (the real Grey Owl looked more like Pa Kettle in a wig) and half-his-age romantic interest Annie Galipeau (who resembles the real Mrs. Grey Owl in gender only) to the movie's extensive catalogue of sanitizing omissions - the real Archie was an alcoholic and bigamist who was once nearly strangled to death by one of his wives - Grey Owl achieves interest only for its frequent flights to the giddy stratosphere of God's Country kitsch.
Brosnan's internationally-bankable butt makes a gratuitous appearance as Grey Owl emerges from a morning dip in northern lake, and Galipeau's breasts are laid gloriously bare in the course of what may be the most dubious treatment of hypothermia ever dramatized.
Then there's the scene which, for this viewer anyway, instantly established a new benchmark in pure cheddar cheesiness: The one in which cuddly baby beaver are seen crawling all over Brosnan's smoothly shaved torso.
I don't care what anybody says, it's gonna take a lot of shaken-not-stirred vodka martinis to wash that one down.
If the braid-stiffening Grey Owl demonstrates a disregard for history which borders on the perverse - imagine taking a fascinating person and, at great effort and expense, pounding him into a boring and unbelievable pulp - Plunkett & Macleane's departures from verisimilitude are at least less mysterious.
As directed by Ridley Scott's son Jake, a music clip and commercial veteran who demonstrates the old man's tendency to allow art direction to pinch-hit for drama, this smugly cheeky production, inspired by the misadventures of two real-life 18th-century English highwaymen, is costume adventure rendered as glibly profane, high-octane buddy movie.
Re-teaming Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle as a pair class-crossed thieves ransacking and wisecracking their way across merrie olde Englande, the tedious Plunkett & Macleane treats history in much the same way that Three Kings' wide-eyed American GIs treat Iraq.
It's a fantasy playground, an underexposed screen on which to project fantasies of superiority. A fun place to visit, but god knows you wouldn't want to live there.
Reassessing the Grey Owl legend
You could say actor/director/producer Sir Richard Attenborough decided to make a movie about Grey Owl when his friend and constant collaborator, producer Diana Hawkins, read a magazine article commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Canadian conservationist's death.
But Attenborough's ties to Grey Owl go back further than that -- to when he was the proverbial boy in short pants and he stood in a line to hear the legendary man speak at a London theatre.
"My brother David and I queued up in 1935, '36 for five hours when he came to England to promote his book," says Attenborough, in Vancouver to promote Grey Owl, which he directed. "He was a total sensation. It was like the Rolling Stones coming to town. You couldn't get near him.
"Here was this man dressed in buckskins with his great hat on, sometimes with his war bonnet on. Traffic stopped. I remember his sense of the theatrical and the incongruity of his presentation. This guy was ostensibly what we called then a half-breed red Indian and he introduced his program with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata."
What young Richard didn't know then, of course, was that the man known as Grey Owl was fluent in Beethoven and many other aspects of the European world. Although he duped the world into thinking he was half-native Indian raised by the Ojibwa tribe in the Canadian wild, he was actually an Englishman named Archie Belaney, raised on tea and classical music in a fine English home. It was only after his death in 1938 that the truth about Belaney was made public.
By then, Grey Owl had become a near-mythic figure, his conservation-oriented articles in the magazine Country Life leading to books that became best sellers in Canada, the U.S. and Britain.
In researching the life and times of Grey Owl, Attenborough knew that a BBC radio interview existed, but he could not find it. After much digging, he learned that the 15-minute interview, done for a daily show called The Children's Hour, was never broadcast because Grey Owl has spoken out against fox-hunting and the head of the BBC Home Service didn't agree with his point of view. "It was sitting in the BBC vaults, unheard," says Attenborough.
North American movie-goers may find Pierce Brosnan an odd choice to play Grey Owl. We associate Brosnan with the TV show Remington Steele and the suave movie characters James Bond and Thomas Crown.
But Attenborough knows a different Brosnan.
"He worked in British repertory [theatre]. He had a real command of language. We needed somebody with that command, someone who knew characterization, and we needed an actor who would be acceptable to the public as someone who could live his life in the wilderness.
"In Britain, we don't breed physical actors. When you think of our great actors -- [Alec] Guinness, [Michael] Redgrave, [Ralph] Richardson, [John] Gielgud -- the big names are not physical actors. [Laurence] Olivier was, and Sean [Connery] is, but most are not.
"Brosnan moved like a panther. He worked very hard at the things he had to do -- snowshoeing, firing a gun, paddling a canoe."
Attenborough remembers something Edward G. Robinson told him about physical acting: "He told me the camera will sort you out. If you're going to perform with any integrity, you have to be absolutely certain about your physical characterization before you begin. At no time should you be thinking about that when you're playing a scene."
Occasionally, Attenborough says, Brosnan would almost imperceptibly resort to a Bond-like mannerism.
When that happened, the director simply said, "He just popped in, Pierce."
The character of Grey Owl is another in a line of historical figures Attenborough has made movies about, including political leaders Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi), Steven Biko (Cry Freedom) and Winston Churchill (Young Winston), writers Ernest Hemingway (In Love and War) and C.S. Lewis (Shadowlands) and actor Charlie Chaplin (Chaplin). He says he has always been drawn to larger-than-life characters, especially those with a social conscience.
"I come from a radical family," says Attenborough, describing his parents as Labour Party supporters who were involved in various social causes.
"They lived that kind of life and took action when they thought it was appropriate. My mother took in hundreds of Basque refugee children during the Spanish Civil War. My father and mother worked to bring Jewish children out of Germany during the Second World War.
"That's the atmosphere I came from," says Attenborough. "If you see something that you disapprove of, something disgusting or inappropriate or an assault on human dignity, then you say it's disgusting. And if you see something that is wonderful, then you let people know about it."
It was for this reason that Attenborough drifted from acting to directing.
"I was somewhat dissatisfied with acting and interpreting. I felt deeply passionate about certain things like colonialism or racism and I wanted to say something. I can't write, but I understand acting and I understand how to reach people through entertainment. And it has to be in an entertainment form.
"Cinema is a people's art form. I don't want to say something that I feel deeply about to two men and a dog in a bar.
GREY OWL'S STORY
He was born Archibald Stansfield Belaney in 1888 in Hastings Sussex, England. While a child, his father emigrated to North America and never returned; his mother left him to be raised by two aunts. Belaney came to Canada in 1903 while in his mid-teens and, enraptured with the country, lived in the wilds of northern Ontario. To anyone who asked, he claimed to be of mixed blood, his mother an Apache and his father a white man who rode in the Buffalo Bill tour.
He fought for Canada in the Second World War and returned to England after being wounded in Europe. He resettled in Canada in 1918. As Grey Owl, he began contributing conservation-oriented articles to Town and Country magazine, his major cause being the saving of the Canadian beaver.
He published several books in the 1930s that became best sellers worldwide. He made two speaking tours of England, in 1935 and 1937, addressing packed houses. During one of these, he spoke to the King and Queen of England at Buckingham Palace.
In 1931, the Canadian government appointed Grey Owl beaver conservation officer at Saskatchewan's Prince Albert National Park, where he lived with his native common-law wife Anahareo. He died in April 1938.
GREY OWL Starring Pierce Brosnan and Annie Galipeau.
Parental guidance. 118 min.
Rating two1/2
Set in the 1930s, the biopic Grey Owl is a lot like movies from that era. It shapes its characters into figures larger than life. It has no bad language. The music plays through scenes the way Alfred Newman scores used to in movies like Young Mr. Lincoln and Gunga Din. And when two characters make love, we witness a kiss or two, a hand slipping under the blanket and then we cut to the next day's sunrise.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows the work of director Richard Attenborough, whose films generally have a museum quality. When making biopics, Sir Dick comes to praise Caesar, not to bury him. Although his subject is a man who lived much of his life as a fake, Attenborough puts him in a noble light.
To say Grey Owl was a fake is not to spoil any cinematic surprise, for the movie opens with his exposure.
Dressed in his Indian garb, preparing to go on stage to deliver his nature-conservation message, Grey Owl (Pierce Brosnan) admits to a snoopy reporter that he is, indeed, a white man from England.
What follows are flashback scenes recapping the decade leading to this revelation: Archie Grey Owl's life in the bush as a trapper and hunting guide, his decision to stop killing animals and try to save them, his relationship with the young native woman Pony (Annie Galipeau) who became his common-law wife, his sudden fame as the literate "red Indian" who, having published several books, embarked on sold-out speaking tours of England.
Seeing Brosnan in braids and buckskins takes some getting used to, but once you accept him, you discover that he is the strongest thing in the movie. With his easy movements and steely glare, he has the hyper-awareness of a man wholives by his wits. Brosnan makes Grey Owl into something more, however, infusing his character with a WASP guilt complex. Grey Owl may livefor the wilderness, but he exudes a fear of being found out. When the swooning Pony tells him, "I love it when you tell me about the old ways," he answers, "How do you know I'm not making it up?"
Grey Owl is as much a love story as it is a biography, and this is where the film stumbles. Galipeau has the right look but not the proper command in crucial one-on-one scenes with Brosnan. It doesn't help that William Nicholson's screenplay has her earnestly reciting lines like, "I thought I could change you!"
The archaic musical score tends to draw attention to itself rather than enhance what's on screen. It seems incongruous to have two native Indians having a heart-to-heart in the wilderness while a full orchestra swirls in the background.
Grey Owl is an old-fashioned movie that could use a shot of postmodernism.
At the Granville, SilverCity Riverport, Esplanade, Station Square, SilverCity Coquitlam, Grande, SilverCity Guildford, Colossus Langley.
There is one major reason why the movie Grey
Owl, the story of the first Canadian
conservationist according to this Richard
Attenborough film, is a dud: it tries to make a
hero out of a liar and a fraud.
Grey Owl, the author of the best-selling 1930s
book The Pilgrim of the Wilderness, was really
Archie Belaney, a Brit from Hastings who made
his way to Canada in his late teens and fell in love
with the bush.
Belaney was about as Indian as, well, Pierce Brosnan, the actor also known as James Bond. That Brosnan was cast as Grey Owl/Belaney is only one of the many reasons this movie stumbles at the starting gate.
The other is the script from William Nicholson that's so wooden it gives everyone slivers.
Nicholson, whose career best remains Shadowlands, the story of C.S. Lewis, seems to struggle with both character and setting here.
Both are awkwardly presented and while the dialogue isn't meant to be comic, it is often simply silly.
When we first meet Grey Owl, he's passing himself off as an
Indian somewhere in Northern Ontario. A beautiful young woman named Pony, played by Annie Galipeau, comes to him to ask if he will teach her the way of her people.
City-raised, she has never learned what it means to be an Ojibway and Grey Owl has a reputation for knowing all the old traditions.
In a relationship which is as predictable as a cliche, the two
begin as bickering partners and then, after she nearly drowns when falling through a hole in an ice-covered lake, soon fall in love.
Grey Owl is a non-committing sort, however, and is reluctant to take the steps required to formalize their union.
Still, the two persevere until one winter when they fail to trap
enough beaver and other animals to cover their expenses. It seems that villainous white guys -- natch -- have been poaching their trapline.
And when Pony rescues two motherless beaver kits and hand-raises them, Grey Owl comes to the realization that trapping is an evil business.
What's more, he's beginning to make a name for himself as a
writer, and the Canadian government offers him a gig as park warden in Prince Albert, Sask., where he establishes a successful game sanctuary.
Pony encourages him to write longer pieces than the few he's
managed to sell to a Toronto magazine, and soon he's shipped his book off to the publisher. It is a major best-seller and a tour of England follows where he begins to make a plea for conservation.
Now all of this is worthy and earnest stuff, and his lecture
series alerts the public to a coming environmental crisis.
What is avoided in this film, however, is the fact that there is
something unworthy in the man's character. He did not write his book as a British adventurer in the northern wilderness but as the authentic voice of an Indian speaking of his culture and his land. It smacks too much of the "noble savage.''
And it is one of the most flagrant examples of cultural
appropriation in the sorry history of one culture pilfering from another.
Archie Belaney may have sounded a necessary alarm about what was happening to the pristine wilderness of this country, but he was also an undeniable cheat.
While it's easy enough to forgive him for that, I suppose, it is
much more difficult to see him as an honourable hero.
STAR GAZING by Rita Zekas
Brosnan showed up for dinner armed with three bottles of Dom Perignon. After dinner, they had chasers at a neighbourhood pub.'
Montreal: Remstar Distribution is backing the 70-screen Canadian
release of Lord Richard Attenborough's Grey Owl, which
opened theatrically Oct. 1, with a massive p&a campaign valued at close to $1 million.
President Julien Remillard says the investment includes funding from Telefilm Canada and the Exhibitor Fund, specifically,
Cineplex Odeon and Viacom, and includes radio, tv, print and the cost of promotional visits in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and
Vancouver by Attenborough and leads Pierce Brosnan and Annie Galipeau.
Remillard says the cost of acquiring and releasing the movie also
represents a long-term branding investment for Remstar. "It
shows we can handle a major picture," he says.
He says the film has received page one coverage in the Ottawa Citizen, the National Post, Chatelaine magazine and the Sept.
27 issue of Maclean's magazine. "You can't buy that kind of publicity," he adds.
Remstar paid a big $900,000 for the Canadian rights to Grey Owl.
Citytv purchased extended Canadian tv rights after a screening at the
Cannes Film Festival, and Remillard says negotiations are
underway with Radio-Canada. Remstar will release the film on video
through Universal Home Video sometime in early 2000.
Grey Owl was produced at a cost of $45 million by Attenborough, Jake Eberts and Claude Leger.
Eberts heads up the newly launched Grey Owl Nature Trust, a national foundation dedicated to education, community projects
and the protection of endangered species.
Remillard says the distrib had hoped for a u.s. sale sometime this past spring and in time for a simultaneous North American release, but that sale has not happened.
Remstar expects to release four to eight films nationally next year.
Before the release of Grey Owl last week, Quebec actress Annie Galipeau participated in her first nationwide publicity tour.
"After the first press conference in Montreal, I asked them 'Is it
always like that for you?' " Galipeau recalls asking her co-star
Pierce Brosnan and director Richard Attenborough.
"They said, 'Yeah -- but you get used to it.' "
The 21-year-old Metis says she is now getting somewhat used to it. She has even been signing autographs after screenings of
Grey Owl and says she is ready to take her career to the next level.
"Yes, I think I'm ready ... but I am still dreaming, I have to pinch
myself. I'm leaving to go home and I think I will feel normal
then."
Home is a small town in southwestern Quebec called Maniwaki. Galipeau could be forgiven if she thought the phone call six
years ago was crank.
"He said 'Hey Annie, it's Richard Attenborough. Can I meet you in
Montreal?' I said, Richard Attenborough wants to meet me in Montreal? No... I can't believe it," Galipeau says.
Attenborough was preparing a film based on the life of Archie Belaney. The Englishman gained fame in the 1930s writing books
on the Canadian wilderness under the name of Grey Owl. Belaney passed himself off for three decades as a North American
aboriginal, as well as establishing himself as one of the world's first
conservationists.
Attenborough was considering Galipeau for the female lead opposite
Brosnan's title character.
Many directors would have tried to pass off an established but exotic
starlet such as Catherine Zeta-Jones or Salma Hayek as
Grey Owl's Iroquois love interest. But Attenborough was adamant about casting a Native in the role.
"I was determined, because I'm making a film about a phony Native
Canadian, the one who was real (in the story) had better
be real," he explains.
He spotted Galipeau's debut, a small role in Map of the Human Heart, and arranged a meeting but found her too young for the
part. The project was delayed, however, and Attenborough looked Galipeau up upon his return to Montreal.
"God bless her, she came with these long legs, a gangling character with her bee sting lips," he recalls, "looking absolutely
enchanting, and we started work."
After winning the role of Anahareo -- otherwise known as Gertrude "Pony" Bernard -- in Grey Owl, Galipeau started work on
her English.
"It was not my first language, so I was working hard on my pronunciation and my intonation. Here on the other side was Pierce
learning how to paddle, how to look like an Indian, how to live like an Indian," Galipeau says.
"Pierce helped me a lot. Always giving me acting tips."
Especially when it came time to shoot a love scene.
I had never done that before! I was real nervous, 'What do I have to
do? Tell me, how do I have to touch you? How do I have to kiss you?'
"The only answer he would give me is: 'Just put yourself in Pony's skin and everything will be alright.' "
GRAPHIC: photo A NATURAL ... Annie Galipeau and friend in a scene from Grey Owl, now showing in theatres.
Grey Owl tells the tale of how Canada's most effective ecological ambassador of the early 20th century -- former trapper turned writer Archie Grey Owl, who donned "Red Indian" ceremonial dress and toured the British Empire, pleading eloquently on behalf of his home and native land's vanishing wilderness -- turned out to be hiding a surprising secret.
Granted, the fact that our hero's being played by Pierce Brosnan is a bit of a tip-off, but even though that secret gets blown within the film's first five minutes with true Attenboroughian deftness, I'll be discreet. Suffice it to say that while the movie does snap awake for the denouement to that revelation -- exhibiting a bit of the charismatic spark and crackle that must have made its mysterious protagonist so compelling during his lecture-hall appearances -- the rest of Grey Owl is pretty much a sludgy parade of overly reverential, sub-Disney simplification.
Not only have they cast the most wooden woman in all of Canada (Annie Galipeau) as Archie's muse and lover -- her sole qualification for the role of native earth-goddess seems to be the truly startling, model-like size of her lips -- but the rest of the characters all slip by in a haze of classic stereotypes: the Nosy Reporter, the Wise Old Chief, the Drunk Who Knows Too Much, the Exploitative White Guys Who Just Don't Understand. Rancid!
Oh, and then there's the cute little beavers, running around everywhere -- getting underfoot, crawling into bed with Annie and Pierce, crying just like human babies.... 'Nuff
said. -- GFProblem 1: The real Grey Owl was not a hero
by Marc Horton , Edmonton Journal
TORONTO STAR
Sunday, October 3, 1999PIERCE DE RESISTANCE
When Pierce Brosnan came to town last week for a special screening of Grey Owl, he visited an old flame.
Brunico Communications, Inc./Playback
SECTION: NEWS; Pg.1, October 4, 1999
Sun Media Corporation/The Calgary Sun
October 5, 1999, Tuesday, ENTERTAINMENT, Pg. 66, Final EDITION GALIPEAU IS THE GENUINE ARTICLE
byTYLER MCLEOD, CALGARY SUN
GREY OWL
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Annie Galipeau.
Written byWilliam Nicholson.
Directed by Richard Attenborough.
(PG) Opens Oct. 1. *
Man, for a guy who's made -- what? -- roughly 700 similarly themed movies, Sir Richard Attenborough desperately needs a thorough lesson in inventive, original cinematic storytelling. As it stands now, he continues to display an amazing gift for taking anybody's life story, no matter how potentially fascinating, and turning it into a big, stinky slab of clichŽd biopic crap.