The Tracy Fragments

When the Tracey Fragments hits UK shores I just know that some will consider it a classic, and while I think the story is an important one to tell I hated the style of delivery which left me with the most annoying feeling I had from a movie since the much heralded (but hated by myself) Brick.

Ellen Page who has received much acclaim two years in a row for movies Hard Candy and Juno stars as Tracey Berkowitz, a young grungy style girl who is the brunt of everyone's jokes at school. For reasons unknown until the end of the movie Tracey finds out on the streets looking for her missing brother Sonny who suddenly disappeared without a trace one winter's day.

The movie is told in the style of the movie Memento in that it picks up the story in fits and starts flashing back and forth from the past to the present each time telling a little bit more of the story. What is annoying though is the style of film-making, the mix of the soundtracks and speech that is drawn together from different aspects of the story; I grew increasingly annoyed with hearing "Why would I lie?" and "I love you Tracey Berkowitz!" each and every time the story juts back into time travel mode. On top of this the screen increasingly becomes multi-sectioned often either showing the same scene up to five times from different angles all pieced together in a sort of collage of images, or as different parts of the same story continuing at the same time. While after 45 minutes you get really used to this, during that same 45 minute the result I found incredibly painful; you know that feeling when you have an incredibly bad headache and someone seems to go out of their way to either make noise or talk to you? This is exactly the same way I felt watching The Tracy Fragments.

Now onto the shock, yes its annoying, yes it reminded me of the anally retentive movie Brick, but I kind of really enjoyed this movie once I got chance to adapt to the apparently revolutionary directorial style. Often directors that take this style of filmmaking have a background in music video's but for Tracey Fragments director Bruce McDonald his teeth were cut on popular TV shows like ITV's The Bill, Queer As Folk, and Degrassi - The Next Generation; all of which have no reflection here.

Once you have adapted to the annoying filmmaking you get to look at the story itself, and understand how it all pieces together, and sadly the story is a real tragedy. When I say tragedy I don't mean that it's a bad story, more that it's a sad story that you can see happening in real life when you pick up papers read internet news stories, or watch TV. It's so sad how incredibly misunderstood Tracey is and how she longs to be part of the school cliché without actually wanting to be, if you get my drift; it's more like that teenage rebellion of wanting to belong without admitting to it, and how this longing to belong lands her in an awful lot of hot water, all the time Tracey in her heart being a really good girl, with a strong moral stance and understanding of what is right and what is wrong.

The casting is filled with the exception of Page with virtual unknowns, although some may recognise Julian Richings, who here plays psychiatrist Dr. Heker, but has been used through his working history in roles that demand a slightly unusual look, yes you guessed it I mean ugly.

I won't go onto the music other than to say it's incredibly annoying combination of bad alternative rock styles.

As The Tracy Fragments continued I found myself more and more won over by the film, and troubled by a lot of the movies content. I loved the way it pieces the story together, with each reveal I got that "Ahhhhhh!" bit of satisfaction, that only the most faithfully watched TV shows can usually provide. Art and film students will love it, older people will hate it, but few will deny (if they can stick with it) that its story is something so incredibly common, but never really told in a movie and from that basis alone The Tracy Fragments in my mind deserves some very high acclaim.