FilmBlather.com

"I haven't found a meaning. I have to search..."

Dying movie characters invariably have unresolved issues with friends and relatives; if they are lucky, there will be an opportunity to hash them out before the end. Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions proposes that the people who gather around you when you are on your deathbed have done enough. There is a lot of history between the protagonist and his son, for example, and between him and his ex-wife, but the assertion here is that attempting to deal with those years of conflict is counterproductive. The focus is on the future. On the mystery.

Remy (Remy Girard) is a college professor dying of brain cancer, in high spirits but wasting away in French Canada's low-cost but ineffective healthcare system -- his room contains half a dozen patients, and the halls are lined with occupied hospital beds, while an empty floor stagnates below. Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), Remy's wealthy son, reluctantly flies in from London at the behest of his mother Louise (Dorothee Berryman). Louise is angry at being burdened with all of this; her ex-husband was a notorious womanizer, and on his deathbed he makes no apologies and seems to have no regrets. Remy and Sebastien do not understand each other; the older man laments that his son has apparently never read a book, and Louise counters, "he may not read, but he earns more in a month than you in a year."

Indeed, Sebastien's strategy in all situations is simply to hurl money at the problem. He offers to pay for a transfer to a cushy United States healthcare facility. When his dad refuses, he bribes the hospital administrator and the head of the hospital's vicious union to relocate his father to a private room on an empty floor. He pays Remy's students to come visit and pretend that they miss him. His high-tech laptop computer provides his seafaring sister with the opportunity to send her father video messages by satellite.

He does, to his credit, get in touch with several of his father's good friends and convince them all to fly in. The lively group conversation that ensues suggests an ancient rapport that is not about to be disrupted by something silly like cancer. Diane (Louise Portal), one of these friends, has a daughter who is a junkie, and through her, Sebastien is able to obtain heroin to make Remy more comfortable. Eventually, they move him to a lakeside cottage where he can live out the rest of his days undisturbed.

These characters do not work out their problems, but they put them aside. At one point, Remy asks his son to explain what exactly it is he does for a living, and when Sebastien obliges we're not sure if Remy really understands, but he definitely makes a show of it. Louise gradually accepts the fact that her ex-husband was a philanderer of the worst order and decides to be there for him anyway. We gather that his daughter, out somewhere delivering yachts, has nothing in common with him whatsoever, and yet she thoughtfully tells him, over satellite, that "the first man in a woman's life is her father."

In the shatteringly powerful final scenes, Remy thanks his family and friends for their presence and their smiles. Then it hits us: nothing else matters. They gather around his wheelchair to send him off into whatever is to come. The father embraces the son. In the end what's important isn't who hurt whom, but who comes back to simply be there. The very act of returning is both forgiveness and reconciliation.

There are other elements. September 11th is mentioned (and shown!) in an attempt to add topicality, and that enigmatic title comes back in several different ways. "The history of mankind is a history of horrors," says Remy in one of his pontificating moods. So, we gather, is the history of this family. Doesn't matter. Remy wants to search for a meaning to his life, but it is right there in front of him, in the people who have come back to give him peace.