Films by Peter Lynch
Now Playing: Wexner Center retrospective
Strange, witty and very Canadian, the work of Peter Lynch tends to focus on obsessive men who pit themselves against the forces of nature. In his most famous film, the cult hit PROJECT GRIZZLY (1996), Lynch trains his camera on Troy Hurtubise, a blue-collar worker who has designed a special suit that will (hopefully) engage a grizzly bear in hand-to-hand combat. The film shows Hurtubise testing out the unwieldy-looking suit, the sixth attempt to date, using such techniques as ramming it with a 400-pound swinging log and a 3000-pound truck (both with Troy inside) and shooting it with arrows and bullets (thankfully, without him inside). However, when Troy finally gets his chance to actually use the suit, he discovers that it's nearly impossible to move in the bear's natural habitat, so it's back to the drawing board. The film contains a number of laughs (many of the disbelieving variety), and Troy Hurtubise proves an engaging subject, though I'm sure not all would agree.

Lynch's subsequent film, THE HERD (1998), is less comedic in tone, focusing instead on a forgotten incident in Canadian history. In 1929, the Canadian government organized a project to move several thousand reindeer from northern Alaska to Canada's Mackenzie Valley. The expedition was headed by experienced "reindeer man" Andy Bahr, then in his early sixties, with the mission scheduled to take roughly a year and a half. Instead, faced with bitter cold, harsh winds, plummeting morale and deserting deer, the move took six years to complete, and at various points the film cuts away from re-enactments of the drive itself to actors playing various figures who had stakes in the project, including Colm Feore as a biologist who questions Bahr's methods and Don McKellar as a clerk who keeps track of project setbacks in the comfy confined of an office. Bahr's first-person accounts are read by Graham Greene, and the narration is prone at many points to poetic flourishes, the most memorable of which is:

Big fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,
And so ad infinitum.

Lynch's most recent film A WHALE OF A TALE (2004) finds the director himself at the center of the story. While doing some background work for a project involving a buried bone found in a city, he stumbled on a real-life incident similar to the one he was writing about, which inspired this film. Lynch is infinitely curious about this bone (the vertebra of a whale of some kind), and his quest takes him all over, from the Eastern seaboard to a paleontologist in St. Louis, even briefly to the West coast. During the film, the director floats a number of compelling theories as to the bone's origin- a missing piece from a dead whale discarded from a circus, to name one example- and when the professionals prove to be of little help he takes the bone to various self-anointed "whale experts," who even without degrees have devoted a great deal of time to piecing together whale skeletons. When Lynch finally gets a semi-definite answer to the nature of the bone, it's much less exciting to him than the stories he had conjured in his mind.

Due to shipping problems, the Wex was only able to screen the first hour of CYBERMAN (2000), Lynch's film about a man who augments his perception of the world using computers. However, what I saw was certainly of a piece with Lynch's other films. The film's protagonist, Steve Mann, is so singlemindedly committed to his "better living through cybernetics" lifestyle that he is less concerned with practical science than with his own pet obsessions. I also thorougly enjoyed two of Lynch's early shorts, ARROWHEAD and ST. BRUNO, MY EYES AS A STRANGER (both 1993). ARROWHEAD is a hilarious short that features Don McKellar as a kind of man-child leading a camera crew on a tour of his childhood home, ostensibly to discuss his finding of a mastodon on the complex. The hero of ST. BRUNO is a man who takes photographs of his family, friends and neighbors in Toronto's Little Italy, and the film is effective as a reflection of how one man sees the community in which he grew up.

Ratings:
Project Grizzly and The Herd: ***.
A Whale of a Tale: **1/2.