Faint Lights

Aurora Borealis shoots for fireworks but looks like sparklers.
by Eric Otto

Aurora Borealis is kind of like those family dramas on the station formerly known as the WB: beautiful people in common roles with singular personal problems that are vaguely recognizable but advance nicely as plot, sweeping perfectly into a happy ending. That’s not too surprising since director James Burke comes from a background of producing; here he doesn’t have the teeth to bring any bite to the story. What’s more, lead actor Joshua Jackson is a Dawson’s Creek alum (word up Creek heads) and is growing up like Donny Osmond-back when Donny was trying to be the new George Michael: capable but lacking…something. Jackson knows the role and is appealing, but after a certain point you want to rub a little snow in his face.

However, what Aurora Borealis lacks in punch is made up for thanks to Donald Sutherland in an affecting performance as an old man fighting the double punch of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s without a spec of schmaltz. Paired with another lead from the ’70s, Louise Fletcher, Aurora Borealis is yet another film that demonstrates that that decade wasn’t just a golden age in film directing, but acting as well.

Jackson plays Duncan, a late twentysomething in Minneapolis who has that condition that affects most of his generation: job malaise. He can’t hold a grocery job at a corner store, and he can’t get an easy handout from his successful blue collar brother, or whine his way to a union job with his bar buddy. We’re told this is a life pattern, spurred by-check this out-the death of his father, and the flight of his mother. At 15, Duncan turns into a quitter. In fact the only thing going for him is a job as a handyman for his grandparents (played by Sutherland and Fletcher) where he runs into his granddad’s spunky home nurse Kate (Juliette Lewis). Kate is as footloose and carefree as Duncan is square and tied down to his lost past: Kate blares head banging music in her vintage Cherokee, moshes by night at rock clubs and flashes her coquettish bod at bug eyed Duncan. (What health care agency did she spring from? Damn, sign me up.) When she gets an offer from a friend to sublease a pad on the beach in San Diego, Duncan has to make that fateful decision: bury his father’s memory, grab the cutie and a future, or stay stuck and frozen in Minnehaha. Why, oh why, are these decisions so difficult?

Aurora Borealis develops something of an edge with Sutherland’s performance: Torn between the love of his wife, and the debilitating cruelty of his age-related conditions, he begs Duncan for one shotgun shell. It’s a tribute to the film to take on the subject of aging, which is too often laughed off with kooky elder jokes or manipulated by weepy heartstrings and self-pity. Bringing suicide into the mix, especially the way Sutherland gleefully plays and cuddles with the empty shotgun when alone, is heartbreaking because of the truth it evokes. The emotions Duncan must deal with between his love for his grandfather and giving him a shotgun shell is far more palatable that the hot sex on a cold night with the homecare nurse. But Aurora Borealis can’t fully deliver on this note. We can’t even fully identify with Duncan because for a fuck-up, he’s just so damn nice. His past “mis-adventures” are so vague or just silly (”he quit the hockey team-he could have had a college scholarship!”). Aurora Borealis has good intentions, but just can’t commit.    LAA

Rated R; opens September 22 in selected theaters.