The Hanging Garden

The Hanging Garden is a story about an Irish family somewhere along the coast of Nova Scotia, where luscious flowers grow in a garden nearly every month of the year, and many of the characters are named after flowers, whose characteristics define their personalities. Titles announce three chapters in the nonchronological story, which is directed, produced, and written by Thom Fitzgerald. At the center of the film is William (played by Chris Leavins), who returns home after ten years to attend his sister Rosemary’s wedding. As the tagline of the film proclaims, “It’s hard to go home . . . ten years after your death.” He discovers a dipsomaniac father, a frustrated mother, a grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease, and a younger sister Violet (played by Christine Dunsworth) who is a tomboy of about six years of age who seems destined to become a Lesbian. Because the father, Whisky Mac (played by Peter MacNeill), bullies everyone, we presume that William was forced out of the house when his same-sex proclivities came out of the closet, though we also see that he was overweight and physically abused by his father. Seduced by a boyfriend to strip naked and kiss ten years earlier, his grandmother Grace (played by Joan Orenstein) spied on the kiss from her upstairs window and had a fit, prompting his mother Iris (played by Seana McKenna) to take him to prostitute Dusty Miller (played by Martha Irving) so that he could be seduced into the world of heterosexuality. One of the film’s chapters contains a symbolic suicide by William, representing allegorically his withdrawal from membership in the family. But William appears to have much serenity and considerably less weight now, since he has found a loving relationship with a man named Dick. Instead, the family to which William returned is in the final stage of total deterioration. Rosemary (played by Kerry Fox) obviously married to get away from her father; her spouse Fletcher (played by Joel S. Keller) is the one with whom William tricked ten years earlier, and Rosemary lets the two men pick up briefly where they left off. Iris realizes the wisdom of William’s decision to leave the family and departs the next morning without telling anyone. Whisky Mac arranges to ship Grace to a nursing home. William, finally, drives back to the happy life with his partner, with Violet accompanying him as the newest member of the family. The film is a paradigm of what happens when gays are rejected by a dominant father, who destroys himself out of misplaced guilt and then destroys the love that once produced happy children. The Hanging Garden also shows that sexual orientation is something inside one’s own destiny, not something born of seduction. The film’s sequel, if one comes, promises to be a paradigm of how same-sex families have so much love that they can heal the wounds of children from broken homes. MH

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