Seagrass

dir: Meredith Hama-Brown

2024

This has been an autumn of disappointments when it comes to movies promising something and not delivering. I watched About Dry Grasses in the hope that I’d learn something about dry grasses, but I got nothing on the topic.

Similarly, when I hoped that Seagrass would teach me something about seagrasses, instead I found out just how fucking tedious it must have been to be trapped in this particular family way back in the 1980s.

This flick has had rave reviews at festivals and such, and upon reading some of the most glowing reviews that have ever been expelled onto a Substack platform or a WordPress website, I thought “I should watch this promising sounding Canadian film.”

What a fool I was. The merits of this flick called Seagrass are almost entirely lost upon me.

A family travel to an island resort. The mum Judith (Ally Maki) is grieving the loss of her mother, dealing as one does with feelings of loss, confusion, guilt and disconnection. Her mother was Japanese-Canadian, and was actually interred involuntarily during World War II, which is a reminder that Canada hasn’t always been the beacon for politeness and progressivism that we imagine it to be.

Judith’s husband Steve (Luke Roberts) is not Japanese-Canadian. He’s just Canadian-Canadian, meaning probably that he’s white. They have two kids together, two fairly young daughters, one a tween and one who’s primary school age.

I have to say I was very confused about this film. I wasn’t confused about its depiction of grief, because I can assure you I understand some of the many and varied feelings that come up when you lose your parents. Levels of guilt that were previously only theoretical. Feelings and actions that are a surprise even to yourself. I know that the flick pretty much sets up Steve as the “villain” kind of, and yet his main crime is the moment where, under questioning, when his wife mentions that her mum died, he can’t help but blurt out “Five Months Ago!” as an admonition, as an accusation.

It's hard not to see that as him trying to shame his wife in a public setting by bellowing “YOU SHOULD BE OVER IT ALREADY!!!”

I’m sorry to tell people, including Steve, including Judith, that there is no time limit on grief. Some of us grieve for the rest of our lives.

There is no correct duration for how long someone will be affected by losing someone they’re never going to see alive again. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.

In that sense I am deeply sympathetic to people or characters who grieve past what other people consider to be the “grief-by” date for a human being, or a beloved pet, even.

So Judith is in the position where she is feeling a lot of feelings, and she feels Steve, despite the outwards appearance of being supportive, isn’t really getting where she’s coming from.

The whole point of the trip is for the parents at least to do group therapy with a number of other couples.

Now, I can’t imagine anything more horrible, like, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib would have nothing on this concept. And as the flick is set in the 1980s, the use of therapy-speak is still a growing industry. People are encouraged to yell their feelings and punch pillows and stare into mirrors and stuff and do all this performative bullshit for the other couples.

It is hell, it is depicted as hell, but I think the biggest problem I had with these excruciating scenes is that Steve, being unwilling or unable to take part in these exercises, is depicted as being emotionally shutdown or unwilling to ‘grow’ in these entirely banal ways.

I don’t have a reflexive allergy to the idea of mental health support or therapy or counselling. I think it’s immensely invaluable to people, lots of people, with whatever their struggles might be. It might not be for everyone, but I think most people who can think and express themselves, and reflect on their emotional states, and see, maybe a long time after the fact, what their actual motivations might have been in doing certain things or not doing them, well, yes, it can help some people a lot, a whole hell of a lot.

And I think for certain other people, it’s the worst thing on the planet. It gives them more weapons to use against other people, making them more adept at manipulating the people around them.

I don’t know if Steve is the villain that we’re meant to see him as, just because this style of therapy isn’t working for him.

So, on top of what difficulties Judith is struggling with, and her increasing alienation from her partner, who she’s only just realised isn’t Japanese, there is another couple there, who exist, mostly to be a painful counter-example.

Chris Pang, who as far as I can tell from his accent, is Australian, plays Pat, who knows more about Judith’s parents’ history than she does, and his lovely whitebread wife Carol (Sarah Gadon), are a happily childless couple around the same age as Judith and Steve, so they represent the road untaken. If only Judith hadn’t settled for Steve’s boring arse, and for the lure of parenthood, maybe she wouldn’t be so miserable? I know that thinking is simplistic, she probably things that thinking is simplistic, but it’s still enticing.

Plus Pat is very emotionally available, being the star of the group therapy sessions, so in touch with his emotions and his past, it’s oh so wonderful seeing how together he is.

Naturally, Judith is very attracted to him, and Steve starts off awkward with him, and only becomes more resentful and competitive, because he can see how much his wife prefers Pat’s company to his, and he doesn’t even think it’s sexual attraction necessarily.

So. We have one very annoying couple, who aren’t so much sniping at each other like they’re in a remake of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, so much as they’re just an irritating and irritated couple continuously being low-level shitty with each other, and then there’s another couple who look like they stepped out of a catalogue, but they’re pretty superficial. Things between them only get more fraught, and eventually really ugly, but I’m ashamed to admit that very little of that nonsense moved me, or interested me that much.

Well, what’s left? What’s left is the kids, the two daughters. Maybe their story will be filled with insight and revelation?

Maybe not. The youngest one Emmy (Remy Marthaller) doesn’t connect with the other kids her age, but gets fixated on a purple ball. There is a horrible scene where a bunch of boys are running around trying to pull girl’s pants down, but because it’s the 1980s, no-one bats an eyelid.

The older daughter Stephanie (Nyha Huang Breitkreuz) is at that annoying stage of development where she’d burn her whole family down just in order to impress a bunch of kids her own age who would otherwise never think of her. She falls into a little dyad with an annoying girl who says openly racist shit to her about her appearance, but Steph takes it all, because that’s what you do, I guess.

As annoying as some of Steph’s behaviour is, I found the performances of the kids to be the only part of the film that I actually enjoyed, and I eventually figured out why.

The flick isn’t saying, necessarily, anything about who’s right or wrong. Judith is clearly struggling, and as her actions get more erratic towards the end of the film, the point isn’t “what crazy shit will dysfunctional grief-stricken people do next?” It’s that people struggling, in a fractious relationship, aren’t best placed to look after themselves, and in this case, after their kids, no matter their good will or intentions.

And what it could result in is a further tragedy. I felt, at a certain point, the flick was almost saying “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

But that would have been a mistake to assume. There is something slightly ‘else’ going on in that part of the flick, which is foreshadowed, but also uses a certain possibility of a supernatural element in a very gentle fashion, and it’s only confirmation is a tiny smile on the mother’s face as she thanks her mother for looking after her kid.

It's still not enough for me. I found watching this film a pretty unpleasant experience, but in truth life can be pretty unpleasant, let’s be fucking honest. I think other people might get more out of it than I did, but I can still see its merits.

The other thing I realised, which took awhile, which I alluded to earlier, is that I thought the flick was from the point of view, the perspective, of the mum, Judith. I didn’t realise until much later that it makes much more sense for it to be a reminiscence, a reconstruction of the memories of a child, looking back, given the setting and the era, and the age of the director. Since she’s using some elements from her own life, I think she was one of the kids, probably Steph, if I was to guess.

And that does alter my appreciation of the flick somewhat.

Still, I know as little about seagrass now as I did at the beginning of this two hour long film about how crappy couples mess their kids up.

6 times punching pillows doesn’t do shit unless you really hate pillows out of 10

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“They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” – Larkin’s poem “This be the verse” is not in Seagrass, but it seemed awfully apt.