Waydowntown (Gary Burns, 2000) (Patreon)

There are films that I watched when they were new, and although I may have liked them well enough at the time, they didn't strike me as anything particularly special. But then, a strange thing happens. They stick with me over the years, far more than "better" films do. It can be specific lines of dialogue, a chosen image, or a performance that in retrospect starts to seem far more emotionally potent than it did when I first experienced them.

Granted, a lot of time this gradual shift-in-memory has to do with the eventual development of a given filmmaker. For instance, I quite liked James Gray's We Own the Night when I first saw it. But in the intervening years, as I have watched Gray's development as an artist and, in particular, Joaquin Phoenix's trajectory as an actor, it has come more and more to seem like a major film. I need to resee it and discover if my subjective experience, the way the film has grown in memory, is borne out by the facts. (It's always possible, even likely, that we remember the good parts and conveniently forget the bad, or the average.)

Over the years, one of the more inexplicable "growers" has been Waydowntown, the rather modest office comedy by Calgary filmmaker Gary Burns. Distinguished at the time as one of the few English-Canadian films not by a big-name auteur (e.g., Egoyan, Cronenberg) to receive an American release, Waydowntown is fundamentally silly, even as it organizes itself around some compelling concepts. There is a long tradition of both soullessness-of-office-work films and dehumanizing-urbanization films, and no one will mistake Burns' contribution for either Mike Judge of Jacques Tati. But to my surprise, Waydowntown holds up.

Taking place during one hour (a long lunch) of day 23 of a bet between four low-level office drones to see who can go the longest without stepping outside, Waydowntown takes a little and does, if not a lot, then more than you'd expect. The primary focus is Tom (Fab Filippo), a hyper-articulate 20-something stoner who is under the mistaken impression that he's a nice guy. While his co-workers might be outwardly Machiavellian (Gordon Currie), feckless (Tobias Godson), or too tightly-wound to function (Marya Delver), they at least evince a modicum of self-awareness. Only over the course of this very strange hour does Tom discover just what an asshole he really is.

Burns combines this rats-in-a-maze learning process with a deeply local, unnervingly lived-in examination of the specifics of downtown Calgary. The city, distinguished by the Plus-15 elevated walkway system that connects all the buildings with enclosures, reflects a good idea (avoiding the snow) gone horribly wrong. The fact that Tom has an ant farm on his desk is not exactly subtle. But there's actually nothing subtle about Waydowntown. It has a primary theme, orchestrates that theme through adherence to certain genre patterns, and hits them all as if it were a train pulling into every station on the line.