Canvas
Director: Joseph Greco
Stars: Joe Pantliano, Marcia Gay Harden
Classification: STC
Rating: *** 1/2
 
Movies don’t come more personal than Canvas, writer/director/co-producer Joseph Greco’s serious-minded exploration of the devastating effects unleashed by mental illness upon an otherwise tightly knit American family.

Loosely based on Greco's childhood, the low-budget picture may be somewhat predictable in its plotting, but nonetheless packs a powerful emotional punch.

Ten-year-old Chris Marino (most recently seen in Changeling) lives a quiet life with his blue-collar father Joe (Joe Pantoliano of, among other things, The Sopranos) and artist mother, Mary (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden) in sunny Florida.

But as Chris begins his new school year, discovering girls and seeking social acceptance, Mary begins to lose her battle with schizophrenia, throwing public fits of police-baiting rage and displaying crippling amounts of irrational paranoia.

When his beloved wife is hospitalized indefinitely for treatment, Joe copes by constructing a massive sailboat on the family’s front lawn with the vague hope that a long-broken promise of sailing around the world might rouse Mary from her illness.

Meanwhile, the increasingly despondent Chris begins to suspect his otherwise stable dad may be slipping into madness himself.

There’s both an anger — the screenplay takes several pointed stabs at the U.S. health care system — and honesty in Canvas that buoys the film and consistently keeps it from lapsing into cliché-ridden disease-of-the-week territory.

Greco’s direction is unaffected, the pace is brisk and Joel Goodman’s dreamy, melancholy score is refreshingly subtle, never overpowering the film’s actors during the more volatile, showier scenes. 

But the real strength of the picture rests with the always reliable Pantoliano (he, along with Harden also served as creative producers), who manages to sculpt a complex, searing portrait of a good man in the grip of unimaginable stress.

Nowhere is his craft more evident than in a gently observed, quietly disarming sequence in which Joe is caught flipping through photo albums, smiling at past pictures of his then-healthy wife before dissolving into uncontrollable tears. By the time Canvas sails into its lyrical, bittersweet conclusion, you just might find yourself joining him.