- Don McKellar's The Grand Seduction is an inspiring story of a heroic woman named Barbara (Cathy Jones) who takes a thankless job as a manual laborer in St. John's, Newfoundland because her husband can't find work in the small harbor town of Tickle Cove. It is also the tale of an independent-minded postal employee named Kathleen who, in addition to being one of the few citizens of Tickle Cove who holds a regular job, refuses to allow herself to be sexualized despite being apparently the only young unmarried women in town. With characters like these, how could the film be anything but an exhilarating and progressive-minded affair?
- It's at this point that I feel I may have misled you, dear reader. Despite containing the two characters described above, The Grand Seduction is actually intended to be about a doofus named Murray (Brendan Gleeson) who seeks to attract a petrochemical recycling plant to Tickle Cove. He has one legitimately admirable reason for wanting this, namely to generate jobs in an economically lifeless part of the province, but he and his crony Simon (Gordon Pinsent) clearly envision an ideal world in which men work all day while women sew and cook. Furthermore, he explicitly believes that masculine work is a way of earning female companionship, exemplified by the orgasmic sighs that once echoed through the town at the end of each day.
- To achieve this goal, however, Murray needs to find a way for Tickle Cove to attract a town physician, which is one of the oil company's prerequisites for moving. Fate hands him Dr. Paul Lewis (Taylor Kitsch), a "big-city doctor," which in this case means a huge cricket fan with a small cocaine habit. It's while getting stopped at an airport with the coke that Paul is induced to give Tickle Cove a try for a month in lieu of jail. Now all the town has to do is to find a way to keep him around. Naturally, Murray believes that the best strategy is to lie to Paul at every turn about every subject, ranging from the local popularity of cricket to tonight's special at the local restaurant. While some of these white lies are funny, a particularly indecent one involves Murray's deceased son that never existed. Ha, ha?
- Bad taste aside, the real problem with The Grand Seduction is that it clearly thinks Murray can do no wrong. People, this is a man who assumes the title of mayor (without an election, as far as I can tell) and immediately begins misleading everyone about everything. If you think lying about a dead son is funny, how about misinforming the unemployed populace about the certainty of getting the recycling plant? Oh, and did I mention that Murray actually bribes the oil company executive (Peter Keleghan) to move to Tickle Cove? Nothing morally questionable about that, right? Naturally, there are no consequences whatsoever for any of these awful decisions. In that sense, Murray probably does succeed in resembling his forefathers who overfished the local waters and let somebody else inherit the drawbacks to that strategy. The next mayor is going to have a lot of explaining to do when the town budget comes up $100,000 short and the oil company pays zero corporate income taxes. But there's still another orgasmic sigh at the end, so obviously the film thinks everything turned out okay. Consider me "unseduced."
- Based on a French Canadian film of approximately the same name.
