Writer and Director: Karl R. Hearne
Karl R. Hearne’s film The G which had its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival is a slightly ponderous thriller with a social message about grandparents swindled out of their homes and money by spurious power of attorney awarded to criminal groups who then shunt the elderly person or couple into a care facility. Struggling to sustain its human-interest strand with lifeless characters and very little empathy, The G is a laborious watch.
Forcibly manhandled for from their homes, Ann, known as “The G,” and her husband are moved to a hospice where he can be treated and Ann is forcibly held in the building. When granddaughter Emma discovers her grandad and his wife are no longer in their home and its has been sold, she joins up with a stranger to track down the people detaining them, not realising The G has a few connections of her own.
The premise of Hearne’s film is a good one, a scandal that defrauds older people and creates profit for unscrupulous predators, and there are lots of interesting things to say here about the ways society treats retirees, how they are overlooked and forgotten, and the assumption that they are no longer of worth as individuals with interesting lives both now and in the past. And The G taps into some of that in the formation of its central character and the dramatisation of the fraudulent process of divesting them of their assets and its aftermath.
Yet The G struggles for tonal coherence and cannot decide whether it wants to be a piece of social realism or a gangster movie, attempting to unhappily splice the two together tipping into ludicrous violence and plot developments with very little grounding in the narrative. The G’s own background adds a degree of interest to the character but convolutions of ‘bad’ men, some working for the mysterious firm, some for The G are difficult to keep track of, and ultimately far less interesting than perhaps they appear on paper.
Hearne does little to properly explain the corruption that allows this to happen, skimming over the relationships between the crime organisation and dodgy local judges and lawyers who presumably facilitate the power of attorney over a strangers’ assets. Focusing instead on rather generic presentations of mobsters and officials, the film never explains the scale of the issue facing America’s older people, how individuals are targeted in the first place and why the usual judicial and financial checks and balances fail to spot such widespread misdeeds.
Above all The G lacks empathy, Dale Dickey as the title characters doesn’t need to be likeable, in fact it is far more interesting that she is not, but a cold performance and complete detachment makes their situation hard to invest in. Romane Denis as granddaughter-by-marriage Emma tries to work it all out but again there is little sense of her as a real character beyond this rather flimsy story about the antagonistic relationship with both The G and her own mother and stepfather.
The overall messaging may be interesting, but the story never grips in the way it should.
The G had its UK Premiere at Glasgow Film Festival on 29th February.
