After years spent working on short films and documentaries, Canadian writer-director Aisling Chin-Yee finally saw fit to give us a full-length feature, The Rest of Us. Yet it’s clear that Chin-Yee took many of the principles of the former two categories in terms of the execution, storyline and length of the movie. While it can be called a “small film,” it still has the star power of Heather Graham (who shouldn’t be as underrated as she is) playing Cami. As the jilted ex-wife raising her daughter, Aster (Sophie Nélisse), on her own in a country house outside of Toronto, Cami is perhaps not as bitter as she ought to be. In fact, everything about her screams zen Earth Mother when her meticulous perfectionism isn’t getting in the way of cleaning, cooking or working on her children’s book illustrations without putting so much added energy and suffering into it all.
Our opening image of Cami, however, negates this coiffed, button-down persona as she arrives at the Glenwood Motel, garden variety seedy as all motels are. And why shouldn’t they be? For they’re so often a reflection of the seediness that goes on within. Whoever she’s waiting for, clearly it’s someone that she doesn’t want to be out in the open with. When he doesn’t show up, she muses, “I’m gonna kill him.” Irony at its finest, of course, for at that very moment perhaps, he was having a heart attack in the bathtub, causing him to drown. “Him” being Craig Hayes, the philandering, life-ruining ex-husband and father that Cami and Aster both hate (or at least Aster thinks Cami hates him).
The news of his death is delivered via phone by Rachel (Jodi Balfour), the mistress-turned-wife who draws almost the same ire from Aster as her “Father Figure” (the moniker he’s saved under in her contacts). The revelation is a double dose of death, for they’ve just said goodbye to their cat, Boots, at the vet, the last domestic link to Craig, therefore a poetic symbol when overlapped with his own death. Maybe Boots was, subliminally, the only thing left of Craig to take care of his original wife and daughter, and it sent a Twin Peaks-ian shock wave through the universe that saw fit to kill both. As though Craig couldn’t hack being a “family man” for two families without Boots around, even if he was only less than half-assing for the first. In any case, Cami is obliged to take Aster to the funeral, even though she seems to care much less than Cami. For Aster is more enraged than ever over having to see Rachel and Talulah (Abigail Pniowsky) in the house he raised a new family in. Cami, meanwhile, seems to be seeing some part of her life flash before her eyes, most intrigued of all by Talulah playing by herself in the yard. When Cami and Aster leave, both assume they’ll probably never see Rachel and Talulah again.
But Cami gets lonely, and Aster has a tendency to flee the house when she’s not holed up in the trailer outside of it. So it is that she takes some homemade lasagna to Rachel after Aster bails on their dinner plans. When Rachel admits that Craig’s financial situation was dire, it harkens back to something Cami said to Aster while sitting by the pool with her as the latter moodily read Helter Skelter: “There’s no telling from the outside what’s really going on with people.” Thus, it seems all too fitting, in terms of salt in the wound cachet, that his “original” daughter, hoping to at least get some money from his Will, is sure to be left with no recompense for her emotional trauma and abandonment.
The salt in Aster’s wound, however, is only about to intensify when Rachel, with no other options left, decides to take Cami up on her offer to stay at her house (albeit in the trailer outside) with Talulah until she can “get back on her feet.” The fact that Rachel has no education or marketable skill other than being something of a former gold digger doesn’t bode well in terms of just how long that will take. And yet, something startling and altogether unexpected begins to happen as the four women in Craig’s life live together on the same premises: they begin to resemble a family. A prime example of the harmony of a matriarchal setup. For all of Aster’s initial hemming and hawing as well, she seems to be the one to become most enamored of Rachel for her similarly reckless and cavalier attitude–particularly in the wake of the laughable situation she’s found herself in.
Cami, meanwhile, has gravitated toward Talulah and vice versa, relishing the fact that Talulah lets her in without putting walls up… not like Aster does in her present state of angst. With these unforeseen bonds established, it’s only a matter of time before some form of emotional ticking time bomb explodes, and when it does, the relationships forged by these women are put to the test–all thanks to the common denominator of the man they once called husband or father.
The Rest of Us, with its unintentionally classist allusion as a title, does speak to an altogether ignored class–that is, of relationships. Ones that might eventually be shared by an ex-wife and a new wife–when circumstances absolutely seem to force it. The notion of the man that ultimately brought them together despite having torn the original dynamic apart is a poetic and fresh approach to the usual tired storyline about infidelity. And best of all, the man involved is invisible. It shows that the gray areas of the impossible expectations put upon most humans to be faithful are not limited solely to men or the mistresses “tempting” them, or the constructs of good versus “evil.” It’s a human frailty that can crop up in many iterations and many types of people. Even if the outcome isn’t always–if ever–as positive as it turns out to be in The Rest of Us.
By the end, every woman except Cami has been filmed at some point in her pool, one she herself never seems to enjoy despite being the benefactress of everyone else’s use of it. With the intro of the final scene being Cami entering the pool, there is an entirely baptismal quality to it (one in direct contrast to the first moment we saw her driving to the motel). As though, with Craig’s death, she has been reborn. Just like the rest of them.
