A Breed Apart: An 1850s Family Ranch Struggle is the Anti-Little House on the Prairie
By Jim Slotek
Rating: A-
A Breed Apart is writer/directors Adam Belanger and David Lafontaine’s thoughtful, and rigorously slow-moving tale of a widowed father and his son’s uphill battle to start a cattle farm in 1850s Ontario.
It is a lot of things: contemplative about life, fathers and sons, religion, mule-headed stubbornness in the face of failure, repressed feelings in colonial pioneer society.
What it’s not is Little House on the Prairie. Hearts are not warmed here.
Sydney (Joshua Close) and his son Emmett (Isaac Highams) face another crisis
As it is for the characters whose frustration we come to feel, A Breed Apart is a grind of the Biblical kind. When young Emmett Tompkins (Isaac Highams) flees his chores for cursive lessons from his school-teaching neighbour Clara Pender (Krista Bridges), he is handed a Bible to learn the harsh lessons of the Book of Job. “You’re in for a treat,” she says giddily.
Job is maybe a little on the nose for Emmett’s plight and that of his father Sydney (Joshua Close). Or maybe not, as it inspires young Emmett to wonder whether the futility of their hard work is ordained by God. And as screen-time passes, you too may find yourself thinking, “God, can one more thing happen to these people?”
Sydney, it seems, had a hubris-fueled dream back in England. He would take the Herefordshire cattle he’d grown up helping raise and start anew in Canada, creating a new market to compete with price-gouging American cattlemen (the filmmakers swear this was written years before the word “tariff war” entered our lives).
He does all this without seriously considering the harsh climate, utterly foreign cattle diseases and other challenges.
All if this is synopsized in this review. In the film, these details are delivered piecemeal between lengthy uncomfortable silences. Give it a chance and your mind may let go of its need for constant stimulation and start to appreciate the grim, glacier-like pace of rural life pre-electricity, let alone pre-Internet. A Breed Apart is not a feel good movie, but it is a feel-like-you’re-there one.
A Breed Apart opens on a note it sustains, at the funeral of Emmett’s mom Ophelia. It is the first, and most profound of the setbacks to follow.
As if to mock Sydney’s futility, the Penders nearby have one of the biggest stocks of cattle in the county. But they are not set up as opportunistic villains, as one would expect in a pioneer trope. They are generous with their help (though their youngest son has a mean streak, and derides the introduction of the weird looking English cattle).
What light there is in the grim comes from the child actors, most notably, Highams, the one cast member flown in from across the ocean, here to play the young transplanted precocious English lad. His Emmett engages his father from the beginning about his mother, Heaven, etc.
At first the questions are directed to a virtual brick wall, but they serve to bring Sydney’s character around to something more than a grumbling, simmering mute who lights his pipe every so often.
The other underage scene stealer is Charlie Storey as the lively Beth Pender, previously her mother’s only apparent pupil, who lights up at the arrival of someone her age. Eventually, they become friends and co-conspirators.
Beth is a remarkable chatterbox for a child isolated from the wider world. Or it could be her own way of coping with a hard life. I suppose most people needed one back then.
A Breed Apart. Written and directed by Adam Belanger and David Lafontaine. Stars Isaac Highams, Joshua Close and Charlie Storey. Opens Friday, October 9 at Imagine Cinemas Carlton in Toronto.