The Grand Seduction

After putting Ireland back on the movie-making map in The Guard and Calvary, Brendan Gleeson strays off course in a comedy drama that offers a portrait of a Celtic community in Newfoundland that is contrived in its quaintness. Gleeson plays salt-of-the-earth Murray, the loudest mouth in a fishing village where the waters have nothing left to give and even Murray's wife has moved away. So the remaining locals try to revive their fortunes by pitching for a contract that will turn their home into a recycling outpost for an oil company. To support that bid, they must persuade a visiting American doctor to take up permanent residence, using all the olde worlde charm at their disposal. Taylor Kitsch is grey and bland as the gullible doc, which might have made the locals appear more colourful except they're already trying too hard. There are echoes of Bill Forsyth's 1983 classic Local Hero here, except that in trying to send up the postcard image of its location, director Don McKellar inadvertently gives the story an unappealing, cynical edge.