Breakfast With Scot

Like so many Canadian comedies, Breakfast With Scot suffers not from a lack of ideas, but from bland, dumbed-down execution. Based on Michael Downing’s great novel of the same name and transferred in setting from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Toronto, the film tells of Sam (Thomas Cavanagh), a retired, closeted ex-NHL player who works as a reporter for a TSN-like broadcaster. He and his partner, Eric (Ben Shenkman), are thrown for a loop when they’re suddenly asked to look after 11-year-old Scot (Noah Bernett), the orphaned spawn of Sam’s brother’s former lover (yes, it’s convoluted), and the kid is more flaming than both Sam and Eric put together. There’s considerable fascination here: it’s still rare to see effeminate boys portrayed in media of any kind (tomboys, on the other hand, are ubiquitous in coming-of-age narratives), and Scot—unlike, say, the hero of Alain Berliner’s 1997 film Ma vie en rose—is goofy and bumptious in his girliness. Not unlike Blanche DuBois, Scot spills the costume jewellery and boas he’s inherited from his dead mother all over Eric and Sam’s house; his love of all things sparkly and spangly poses a distinct challenge to his uptight wards, daring them to have fun and enjoy life’s frivolities. Of course, Eric and Sam eventually do, and Eric emerges from the closet triumphant; these are lessons one expects to be fed in a film such as this, but they are placed by director Laurie Lynd on the most predictable of platters. Lynd and screenwriter Sean Reycraft want to warm our hearts—in a 1980s, family comedy, Three Men and a Baby way—and thus fill their film with safe, groan-worthy comedy: nerdy friends, junior hockey pratfalls and meddlesome biddies (played here, naturally, by CanFilm mainstays Sheila McCarthy and Fiona Reid). This doesn’t make Breakfast With Scot intolerable; it just makes it, for all its innovations, rather inconsequential. WAIT FOR THE REPS

Breakfast With Scot is now playing at the Carlton (20 Carlton St.) and Canada Square (2190 Yonge St.).