There are two main types of stories about smalltown people finding themselves: ones where they move away from the suffocating place where they grew up, and ones where they come back. “Close to You” is the second kind of movie. Written and directed by Dominic Savage, starring Elliott Page in his first lead performance as a trans man, and based on a story that Page co-wrote, it’s about a trans man going home to the small town where he grew up to visit his family after four years of finding himself in a big city. It’s raw and often powerful—less of a carefully shaped drama than the equivalent of a series of boxes filled with explosive material being slung about. It’s less concerned with winning points for neatness than in letting scenes unfold in an unflinchingly immediate way. Sometimes it hurts, and it’s supposed to.
Page’s character, Sam, leaves the small flat in Toronto that he shares with a roommate and takes a train back to his hometown near Lake Ontario because his dad Jim (Peter Outerbridge) is having a birthday party. Jim is happy to see Sam, calls him “son,” and is generally warmer and supportive than you might have anticipated given Sam’s dread. Sam’s mom Miriam (Wendy Crewson) is overcome with emotion at having Sam back in the house but also afflicted by attacks of guilt and shame over having failed him.
Sam’s sisters Kate (Janet Porter) and Megan (Alex Paxton-Beesley) and brother Michael (Daniel Maslany) are also supportive. But there are moments where their theoretically sensitive questions and chit-chat have a passive-aggressive undertone, or perhaps a sense that they’re trying too hard or overcompensating. It’s a performance of liberalism or “tolerance” whose primary audience is themselves, not Sam. (There may also be an unexamined defensiveness on the part of the sisters for having stayed put and embraced a classic heteronormative smalltown lifestyle rather than going off to the big city like Sam to take risks and have adventures.) Some of Page’s most eloquent and multilayered close-ups capture that grin-and-bear-it double-bind that people in Sam’s situation find themselves in, where it’s not appropriate to jump on another person for failing to react in precisely the correct way at every given millisecond because they are only human, and, in their own minds at least, they mean well. Whatever the flaws, their behavior is preferable to the alternative.
The alternative—at least a nonviolent version of it—is represented by Sam’s brother-in-law Paul (David Reale). He seems to think he’s being curious and welcoming and “just asking questions” to understand things, but he comes across as a resentful, fearful person. There’s an angry undertone to his attempts at connection. He behaves as if the mere presence of Sam is an accusation of bigotry against him. He’s obsessed with how Sam’s identifying as a man forces the rest of “them” (mainly him) to change and adapt—as if it were fair to ask Sam to perform femininity under an old name so that Paul would feel comfortable? Is that what Paul wants? It’s hard to say, and Paul probably doesn’t know either.
