When you’re upstaged by a highway

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 11:49 AM - 2 Comments

For Joshua Jackson, it was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. After spending a dozen years in the U.S.—half of them coming of age with Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams in the cast of Dawson’s Creek—at the age of 30, this Vancouver-born actor was finally making his debut as a Canadian movie star in a Canadian movie. He had got time off from his Fox TV series, Fringe, and was flying from his home in New York to attend last fall’s premiere of One Week at the Toronto International Film Festival. Then he lost his passport; he had to cancel the trip. Making matters worse, his wife, actress Diane Kruger, had flown in ahead of him, and had to wait five hours to catch a flight back to New York. “I completely screwed the pooch,” Jackson told me sheepishly in a recent interview. “Rarely have I been so embarrassed.”

What’s ironic is that this émigré actor who somehow misplaced proof of his national identity is starring in what has to be the most slavishly Canadian movie of all time. He plays Ben, a frustrated Toronto teacher and novelist who learns he’s dying of cancer. Impulsively, he buys a vintage Norton motorcyle, ditches his brittle fiancée (Liane Balaban), and heads west. Shot along the Trans-Canada Highway, en route to Tofino, this bittersweet road movie turns into a virtual souvenir shop of Canadiana, from the roll-up-the-rim message on a Tim Hortons cup that lifts Ben’s spirits to the kitschy roadside monuments that serve as his stations of the cross—including the world’s biggest Muskoka chair, Inukshuk, hockey stick, paper clip, fire hydrant, nickel, teepee, dinosaur, goose and muskie.

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