Movie review: 'Canvas'

2 1/2 stars (out of four)

“Canvas” is a thoughtful, sweet film that handles its difficult topic—schizophrenia—with tact and tenderness.

It disappoints, in the end, thanks to lapses in basic storytelling. But it’s sensitive and well-performed, anchored by an impressive juvenile lead (Devon Gearhart) and two noteworthy adult performances. The ever-dependable Marcia Gay Harden is dependable again, providing a portrait of a schizophrenic woman that’s finely etched, sharply real and void of actor-like exaggeration.

But the real surprise is Joe Pantoliano, who’s restrained and believable as a worker in the boat construction industry in south Florida trying to maintain normal family life despite his wife’s illness. Those steeled to encounter Pantoliano’s combustive anger and boorish ego on view in “The Sopranos” will discover another actor here—understated, empathetic and warm.

Writer-director Joseph Greco has experience with the disease in his own family, and his approach to “Canvas” is insightful and uncompromising. We’ve come a long way since “The Snake Pit.” Still, mental illness can unsettle and frighten the inexperienced, its startling and inappropriate social behavior more challenging to sort out emotionally for relatives than terminal disease. Greco explores that by focusing on the effects of a mother’s illness on a 10-year-old son at an age when taunts, biases and ostracism on such matters still persist. Kids will be kids, and shouts of “crazy” are permissible playground lingo.

Chris (Gearhart) is a loving son torn by his mother’s illness. He sympathizes, but suffers from the embarrassment she causes in public. She boards his school bus and demands he flee with her during one of her paranoid bouts. He’s just beginning to flirt with girls, but she ruins a pre-adolescent, kids-only birthday party at a skating rink, showing up with a homemade cake and party favors as if Chris were still only 5—for a pre-teen, humiliation personified.

Nowhere is Greco’s first-hand expertise more evident than in a scene depicting Chris’ own nightmares that he, too, may be hearing voices and may be destined for mental disease. Though blond and a bit too angelic, Gearhart does a nice job conveying the struggles of a regular kid dealing with the unfathomable.

But, despite its admirable qualities, “Canvas” fizzles and falls into cliche. The mother is hospitalized and largely becomes a supporting character. To complete the story, “Canvas” turns to a weak story line about Chris and his father building a backyard boat, a lame, transparent metaphor signaling irrepressible hope mixed with an understandable urge to just sail away.

John Cassavetes’ 1974 “A Woman Under the Influence” tackled the topic earlier and better, smartly confining events to a more limited time period, a kind of heightened reality crash course. By sweetening its bitter message with emotional lollipops, “Canvas” winds up a noble but flawed endeavor.

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