The Middle Man

Karmack, set in the Midwest, is the kind of town where the Sheriff (Paul Gross from Due South, effecting Burt Reynolds from Boogie Nights) sends you two doors down to the tailor (Bill Lake) to get a suit and five minutes later you’re delivering the bad news to that very same clothier and his wife that their son died–not on the frontlines in Afghanistan, but on the drive back into town.  The roads were slick.

Bent Hamer’s THE MIDDLE MAN gets the pace and the rhythm, or lack thereof, of small towns.  I grew up in such a place.  If you go down to the bar with your buddy—in this case, Steve (Rossif Sutherland)—to take your mind off the bad news that you’d just delivered to Mrs. Stout (Sheila McCarthy), don’t be surprised if it begins with flirting between the two of them and ends with Steve in a coma.  That’s just how these things go.

Barely an hour into Frank Farelli’s (Pål Sverre Hagen) new job as the town’s middleman—who informs next of kin upon a death in the family—the story unfolds like a cross between Northern Exposure and Six Feet Under.  Social skills aren’t Frank’s core competency, and Hagen exploits our prejudices toward podunk townspeople—is he just from nowhere or is he not firing on all cylinders?

Informing Steve’s dad (Kenneth Welsh) of the bad news, he throws in, “He was a bit heavy on the bottle.”

I hadn’t read the synopsis before watching the screening, so imagine my puzzlement expecting your typical film festival, small town character study and taking a left turn into a Coen Bros. adaptation of Witness.

“Know what her mother says? Every day she says that Marian is moving her eyelid,” says the Doctor (Don McKellar).

“You never know, Mark Miller says the same,” replies Frank.

Doc replies, “But her daughter hasn’t got a face,” referring to the gruesome accident that, like Steve, placed her in a coma.

Making sense of the experience requires ditching the uptight formalities of American comedies and accepting Hamer’s and especially Hagen’s dry Norwegian humor.  It’s a complete departure from cult classics like DROP DEAD GORGEOUS which we expect to be funny because the stereotypes are dialed up intentionally.

Here, the close affectations of American accents by Hagen, Aksel Hennie, Trond Fausa and others, has a kind of uncanny valley effect.  We know from the street names (Queen St. W) that they filmed in Canada, but those are just location logistics for independent, low-budget movies.  What we don’t know is, when people start dropping like flies, whether everyone’s extremely unlucky, we’re in an alternate dimension where at any moment frogs might rain down from the sky, everybody suspects that nobody is actually from Karmack, or we’re just watching a Canadian film festival entry.

All of this builds up to an answer that’s just okay, which isn’t half as weird as the actual things I’ve seen happen in Bumblefuck, USA.