Technically, Cas & Dylan was never really a Yorkton Film Festival film, although the festival did host a screening in April to celebrate National Canadian Film day in April. That—and the fact I am on a very tight schedule due to my vacation—qualifies it under the (very loose) criteria I use to determine the subject matter for this column.
I’ve also been wanting to review Cas & Dylan just wanted to review it because I think it got a bit of a bad rap, critically speaking.
Just a bit of a bad rap, though, because it is by no means a masterpiece.
Expectations play a role in how I, and I think many people, feel about a film. Actual movie critics, whom, to a one just about, panned this road flick are probably a little more, um, critical?
Roger Ebert, for example, roasted the flick.
“A GPS hasn’t been invented that could get this plot-hole-riddled script back on track,” he wrote. “Cas & Dylan isn’t so much a road trip as roadkill—flat, lifeless and faintly odiferous.”
Ouch.
Granted, it ain’t Thelma & Louise, the 1991 classic of the same genre about which Ebert had much more glowing things to say giving it a 3.5 out of 4 (spoiler alert, he didn’t like the ending in which the two women drive off a cliff) compared to 1.5 for Cas & Dylan.
Again, ouch.
Truth be told, a lot of the writing would have turned me away had it not been for the rescuing performances of both Richard Dreyfus and Saskatchewan born and bred Tatiana Maslany, she of Orphan Black fame.
Even their very good performances were a bit choppy at times due to uneven directing and oft uninspired dialogue, but it was simply noticeable as opposed to distracting.
For me, the movie gets some slack because it is a truly Canadian production. Filmed entirely in the Sudbury and Calgary areas, it was written and directed by canuck heartthrob Jason Priestly (his debut) and starred Maslany and honourary Canadian Dreyfus, who loves us as much as we love him.
For better or for worse, its Canadian-ness even in the presence of star power, lowered my expectations enough that I was able to put aside its weaknesses for the most part and just go along for the ride.
And, if not a roller coaster, it was an enjoyable enough ride that followed the trajectory of its genre obediently.
Act ones throws the incompatible protagonists together. The crusty and dying of incurable cancer Dr. Cas Pepper (Dreyfus) and the flighty, irrepressible Dylan Morgan (Maslany), a 22-year-old wannabe writer just embarking on her life’s journey.
Predictably, through the intimacy of the road trip, something happens in the second act that threatens to blow up the relationship completely, but ultimately brings them closer together setting up the final act denouement in which their purposes in each others’ lives become clear.
It has something to do with spaghetti sauce.
Formulaic perhaps, but despite its blemishes, I would not ask for the 90 minutes back.
