Citizen Duane

My festival started out Friday night with Michael Mabbot's Citizen Duane, an erratic Canadian comedy about an obsessive, nerdy, indefatigably rebellious high school kid who runs for mayor of his small town.

While on the surface this film may sound perilously (and needlessly) similar to Alexander Payne's brilliant Election, in most ways it is a much different film. The writing is rarely as sharp, for one thing, though at times Stuart and I were belly laughing - particularly at some of the inspired physical comedy. The tone is also wildly inconsistent, ranging from pure (and too often embarrassingly unfunny) farce, through a more mellow and familiar satire, to something approaching edgy melodrama within the family scenes.

The actors were good, esp. Douglas Smith as Duane, and Alberta Wtason as his mother...but some parts felt under written (Duane's on-again-off-again girlfriend) and some you wished you'd never met (the ridiculous ex-boyfriend gossip columnist of Duane's mom comes to mind, but he's not the only one).

I could claim to be disappointed, but I expected relatively little from this film (despite Mabbot's TIFF success last year), and for its just-frequent-enough genuinely inspired moments, and a solid central performance, I would give Citizen Duane a very mild recommendation.