[Disclaimer: Glenn Homes of On Target Media sent me this DVD to review.]

For so many people, family is the dominant factor in life. Aurora Borealis is a movie that explores the beginning and end of family life through Joshua Jackson and Juliette Lewis as the couple coming together and Donald Sutherland and Louise Fletcher as Jackson’s grandparents facing the prospect that their time is over. Complicating the story is that Jackson’s father died ten years before, when the boy was only 15 and the father only 39, sending the youngster into a tailspin from he’s not yet recovered.

Sutherland does an amazing job as Ronald, portraying a man aware that his body has nearly deserted him with his mind not far behind. I never felt that he was slipping over the line into a caricature though that would’ve been very easy to do. Jackson’s Duncan is a bit more of a stereotype but writer Brent Boyd’s dialog and Jackson’s soft touch left me satisfied; one imagines that the former Dawson’s Creek star was happy to have a role that explored realistic emotions intelligently rather than the tweener hype-driven movies he’s mainly been in since that series.

Lewis was nice as the new love, Kate, but at over 30 perhaps a tad old for our boy. Maybe not, maybe reversing the normal Hollywood older man/(much) younger woman relationship was a sign of respect from the producers. Fletcher is still called out for winning the Oscar in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I think was made the year Lewis was born, but my recent memories of her work is from (the highly underrated) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Nonetheless, the role of Ruth is very different from either and she gives a quality, realistic portrayal that in many ways is the connective tissue for the movie.

Many of the supporting roles are filled by young actors whose faces will be familiar but will have you scratching your head to match the name: Steven Pasquale (you recognize him from Rescue Me, where he’s a squadmate and married Dennis Leary’s sister at the end of last season), Zack Ward (Christopher Titus’s brother on Titus), and Taylor Labine and Timm Sharp (small parts in many TV shows and movies made in Vancouver, where most of this was shot).

Boyd and director James C.E. Burke combine to give us a nicely paced story that doesn’t resort to filler to show off the star or some unrelated idea. They also playing on the setting of Minneapolis and use locale-specific things like the winter weather, Paul Westerberg and, of course, the northern lights that give us the movie title for a non-generic flavor. Too many other small films (and I use the term in the sense of intimacy and budget) could be set in Metropolis for all that we get from the location.

recommended