Director: Michael Dowse
Writer: Michael Dowse
Stars: Jay Baruchel, Ed Helms, Laurence Leboeuf
Synopsis: The film chronicles the daredevil stuntman Ken Carter’s quest to execute a bold stunt of launching a rocket car across the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the United States in the 1970s, facing absurd challenges along the way.
Anyone likely seeing Michael Dowse’s The Stunt Driver probably hasn’t seen Robert Fortier’s The Devil at Your Heels, the movie that inspired this dramatized biopic about stuntman Ken Carter (Jay Baruchel) attempting to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car. Unless you’re Canadian, the existence of the National Film Board might not ring a bell, but Fortier’s documentary will make you understand the type of individual Kenneth Gordon Polsjek is at a much deeper level than Dowse’s surface-level attempt to “blockbusterize” such an event, as he blurs the line between the artifice of documentary and fiction filmmaking.
Dowse frequently incorporates 16mm footage from Fortier’s documentary, even casting Joe Cobden as the director who follows Carter’s crazy dream for about five years, while also recreating scenes from The Devil at Your Heels with Baruchel as Carter. But he’ll also occasionally insert shots of the real-life Carter analyzing the ramp he built for a stunt that not even Evel Knievel (Ben Foster) will perform, as he switches formats (16mm to 35mm to digital), aspect ratios, and lenses to bring a multifaceted portrait of a long-lost Canadian figure who should have his time in the spotlight.
In a way, this artistic intent seems refreshing. Instead of a traditional “cradle-to-the-grave” biopic, here’s a form-blurring movie that floats between two types of documentaries (one designed to parse who Carter is, the other, produced by the Japanese, to bring him down), and the fiction film Dowse is directing. The Goon filmmaker will change a few elements of the story, notably who ends up attempting the stunt, but stays mostly true to what has happened through note-perfect recreations of the event and Jay Baruchel’s best-ever performance. He’s the reason why the movie remains mostly watchable, as he perfectly represents Ken’s desire to be remembered within the history books of the great (if not the greatest) stunt performers who ever lived.
There’s a quote in The Devil at Your Heels that is, of course, repeated in The Stunt Driver which encapsulates everything about Carter’s desire to jump:
“This is my dream. This is the end of my dream. I don’t care if I never jump again, but this I’m going to do. This is my dream. I created it, I built it, I designed it. Nobody ever jumped a car a mile. That’s what I’m gonna do. It’s what I want to do. And it’s what I’m gonna do. The thing about it is, it’s something you only dream about. What I can do: jump 18-19 cars, 20 cars? Go out there and bust more bones? You’re right, I’m getting too old! But not old enough to do this.”
When he says it at the end of the documentary, you feel the urgency that this is what he needs to do, as crazy as it is. Jumping a mile from Canada to the United States through a large ramp in a rocket car that certainly won’t fly is what medical professionals might describe as suicide. But we feel for him enough that we want him to do it.
In The Stunt Driver, when Baruchel recreates this monologue, the effect is minimal, because Dowse has no idea what to say about Carter. He treats him as an almost mythic figure, but with no real interior exploration of who he is. In contrast with Fortier’s documentary, which actively does the work of examining him inside and outside the stunt community, The Stunt Driver falls short at illuminating audiences to a long-lost figure who deserves his time in the spotlight for the crazy stuff he attempted to do, because he, of course, never jumped the river. There were too many errors, too many bad-weather attempts, and the project’s backers eventually chickened out after one attempt left a driver severely injured. The bad ingredients kept piling up until it became unsustainable.
As a result, The Stunt Driver isn’t about the stunt itself, but about Carter’s stature within the pantheon of Canadian figures. Unfortunately, Dowse is too busy shifting aspect ratios at every second to bother giving a thoughtful interrogation of its titular character. But he also doesn’t give much development to Dick Keller (Ed Helms), the designer who helped bring Ken’s rocket car to life; Even Kneivel, who is far more humanized in Fortier’s film than in the way Dowse depicts him; and Carter’s girlfriend, Gloria (Laurence Leboeuf), who just stands there, smoking cigarettes. What texture do they give the character? It doesn’t exist. They’re just shells of the selves that are far more developed in a documentary that’s freely available to view online.
The recreations are fun, sure, but they don’t make a movie, especially when Dowse has no idea what to say about the figure he depicts. He multiplies points of view and modes of filmmaking, but what does that serve if the central narrative itself is devoid of meaning? The only thing you’ll learn about Ken Carter while watching The Stunt Driver is that he was a stuntman with a crazy dream. You’ll never get a chance to see his humble beginnings, the life he had before his desire for risk, nor the ethics of such a stunt through his perspective, and not his backers’. It’s a movie that wants to celebrate him, without knowing what to celebrate, ultimately resulting in a vacuous affair that once again proves Canadian cinema’s detractors right. Our industry is in shambles, and if we keep making mediocre films like these, it may not survive.
At least the documentary will stand the test of time, provided more audiences seek it out…
