On Frozen Blog

If you couldn’t attend OFB Night at the Movies last night, you still have two evenings — tonight and tomorrow — to make it over to the Avalon during its week-long screening of ‘The Rocket.’ I highly recommend you doing so. I would not term ‘The Rocket’ a great movie but rather a good one that was, for me, deeply affecting. A good movie has a way of staying with you a while after the credits roll, the lights go up, and even a day or three later, when your brain hits ‘refresh’ with reminiscing images. That, for this viewer, is ‘The Rocket.’ The film won nine Genie awards — the Canadian equivalent of Oscars — and near 11:00 last night I knew why.

Before midnight last night I’d heard from a handful of friends in the theater express their surprise at the enormity of Maurice Richard’s career. And these impressions had little to do with the number of goals he’d scored.

These friends were Canadians and Americans, and they were reacting with me in precisely a vein I think the filmmaker’s had hoped for. By now you’ve heard that the film has as its heart the issue of bigotry directed at French Canadians in the first half of 20th century North American professional hockey. One Canadian in particular came up to me afterward and shared how emotional she’d become by the film’s illustration of the the brutal, even life-threatening violence directed Richard’s way.

Films that tackle pressing social issues always engage in high-risk endeavors. When they are well made, they are able to avoid a sense of strong-armed didacticism — hautily lecturing the movie-going public. Success here depends on a filmmaker’s adherence to subtlety as well as delineating a nuanced fluency with the issue. ‘The Rocket,’ I thought, achieved this rather gloriously.

And speaking of illustration, the visual beauty of ‘The Rocket’ is what distinguishes it from all other hockey films. Ron Weber told us afterward that he actually felt Montreal’s snowy cold while seated in the Avalon, and I, too, owned up to feeling transported back to 1940s and ’50s Canada. Director Charles Biname offers a virtuoso performance in cinematography. With great effect he strung together scenes flushed out of color, then, in the blink of an eye, following ones saturated in shimmering water color-like portraits. This was an elaborately illustrated period piece, a feast for the eyes. As such, it made for me a wonderful seasonal theater immersion.

Roy Dupuis’ performance in the lead is consistently brilliant. Richard the hockey player matures from isolated introvert to battered agent of social change, and Dupuis accords that notable progression great dignity and credibility. But I most enjoyed Stephen McHattie’s performance as the Canadiens’ maestro behind the bench, Dick Irvin. The story of the relationship between Irvin and Richard is one for its own movie, which Biname honors. This film has at least a half dozen scenes of great emotional impact, and my favorite involved Irvin in the Habs’ locker room late in Richard’s career, when the Rocket’s advocacy for change perhaps secured its most notable convert.