Saint Ralph (DVD)
APPROX. 0 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2004 - MPA RATING: PG-13
" Like the title character, this film is small, but big in many ways.
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In the Roman Catholic church, one of the primary requirements for sainthood is that the individual be chiefly responsible for a miracle. And while 14-year-old Ralph Walker has a ways to go on the other requirements—umm, make that a cross-country marathon—he's determined to bring about a miracle because someone remarked that it would take one to bring his mother out of a coma. Just as one of the priests said, offhandedly, that it would be a miracle if one of the boys would win the Boston Marathon. And so Ralph puts two-and-two together and sets his sights on winning a race after being only recently introduced to the sport of long-distance running.
"Saint Ralph" is a surprisingly delightful film that's a combination of the standard adolescent shenanigans-and-survival, life-threatening illnesses, and striving athlete sub-genres. Newcomer Adam Butcher, with his big ears and wide eyes, is a bona fide screen presence who captures your attention and your heart as a boy whose father was apparently killed during WWII and who also has no surviving grandparents—meaning, if his mother dies, he'd be an orphan.
Somehow Ralph falls between the cracks of the Canadian social services system, because no one looks out for him after his mother enters the hospital. He's left on his own to muck about the house and continue to work up a month's worth of sins to confess each week, the most common of them his testosterone-driven fantasies about sex. He's so preoccupied by sex that it prompts the priest who hears his confession to exclaim that he's a "pervert" . . . or was it the older boys who pranked him by cramming into the booth and playing priest?
The story is set in Hamilton, Ontario, where we find Ralph wearing his schoolboy's uniform by day and trying his dad's military jacket and pipe on for size by night. At Saint Magnus High School he pals around with a red-headed geek and tries to keep from getting picked on or made fun of for his legendary unfulfilled sex drive. The remedy? Crotchety, old-school Father Fitzpatrick (Gordon Pinsent), who's the tough-love villain in this film, sentences him to run cross country under the tutelage of Father Hibbert (Campbell Scott, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose"), a younger and more sympathetic figure who once ran the marathon for Canada in the Olympics. At first the young priest is reluctant to work with Ralph, but the more he sees the boy's determination, the more he's determined to help him succeed. And when Ralph presses forward to the starting line of the 1954 Boston Marathon, against the explicit warnings of Father Fitzpatrick, and his geeky friend sees to it that the whole school knows about it, the narrative turns as rousing as any sports film that builds to a critical moment.
"Saint Ralph" offers a wonderful depiction of life in 1950s Canada, as much as that other movie with a potty-mouthed precocious lad—that leg-lamp-loving Ralphie—does of life in 1940s America. It also reinforces that, whatever the era, one thing remains constant: the rush of hormones that forces adolescent boys to come-of-age whether they like it or not. With just two TV credits under his belt, the gangly Butcher has the perfect blend of irrational confidence and awkwardness on-screen, as does the actress who plays the focus of his attentions, Tamara Hope (as Claire). In scenes together, they are so natural and they so perfectly capture the innocence of cheerful sinners that it carries over to the tone of the entire picture.
