Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ****
Even though The Tracey Fragments, an offbeat Canadian film starring Ellen Page, was made before the wildly successful Juno, it was only after viewers and critics were left dumbfounded by the actress's spot-on, deadpan performance in the latter film that Tracey could get a theatrical (and a subsequent DVD) release in the US.
As with Juno, Page's Tracey is an intelligent, out-of-the-mainstream, teenage girl who's dealing with important issues. But the overall sunny outlook on life that governed Juno is utterly absent in Tracey. Instead, dark and fragmented, the film is the chronicle of a young girl's sick psyche.
Tracey (Page) lives with her abusive and mentally unstable parents in Ontario. She gets picked on at school, where everyone refers to her as "it;" the boy she has a crush on uses her and deserts her in the cruelest way; and her psychiatrist (a man cross-dressing as a woman) is nowhere close to helping her. When her younger brother, who she has hypnotized into believing he's a dog, gets lost under her supervision Tracey leaves home determined to find him -- a decision that unleashes the heroine's emotional breakdown, which really is the film's main subject.
Employing a split screen gimmick that provides us with different perspectives of the same scene and mixes up the film's chronology, director Bruce McDonald (Highway 61) creates the freaky portrait of a person who's struggling to keep her last threat of sanity. While, at times, watching the multiple screens that pop up simultaneously can be tiresome and confusing, it makes Tracey's experience relatable; an effect further facilitated by the documentary-like aesthetic McDonald's hand held camera and frequent zooming lend to the film. Both cinematically and emotionally daring, watching Tracey is an intense experience.
