My Winnipeg :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

I try to evoke, but I have failed! Failed! Disaster! I have tried to evoke the opiations of Guy Maddin, only to discover that Mother in the film is played by Ann Savage, star of “Detour.” Yes! A film in the Great Movies Collection of my Web site! Detour! Rocky road ahead! Savage! Maddin’s father lies in state under a rug in the living room! Dead — not forgotten. Savage stepping around him! Watch your step. Savage! See this film!

Guy Maddin is pretty incomparable. I remember I told my sister to see The Saddest Music in the World, and she called me back to tell me that she hated it and couldn’t even make it through the whole thing. My Winnipeg has got Ebert and most other critics in some kind of spastic fit. As always, though, it appears that Jim Hoberman has found the words:

“Who is alive anymore?” Maddin wonders as the movie wends toward closure. “It’s so hard to remember.” For anyone familiar with his oeuvre, My Winnipeg is additionally ghost-haunted. In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist’s previous movies—from his underground mock epic Tales from the Gimli Hospital through his faux–Soviet silent The Heart of the World to his period spectacular The Saddest Music in the World—come to mind. A conquistador like Werner Herzog sets off for Antarctica to find himself. But for Guy Maddin, the whole world is Winnipeg.