MOVIE REVIEW : Wistful Detail Charges ‘Bye Bye Blues’

“Soap opera” is such a normally pejorative term that applying it to the poignant new Canadian movie “Bye Bye Blues” (Fine Arts) may be apropos but unfair. For all its classic soapy attributes--a working mother coping with children, parents and a seductive would-be lover during the WWII years--it’s a film that paints its own world, beats with its own pulse.

The writer-director, Anne Wheeler, is a real storyteller. Working partially from childhood memories, she’s labored lovingly over “Blues,” lavished rich little animating touches all the way through, invested it with real feeling and tone and sensibility. She’s worked hard to bring every minor character to life. The best of “Bye Bye Blues” genuinely glows.

It’s a touching movie, marvelously detailed, about the plight of “grass widow” Daisy Cooper (Rebecca Jenkins), an Army doctor’s wife, whose husband (Michael Ontkean) is interned in a Japanese P.O.W. camp after the fall of Singapore.

Stuck with two children and no support, living in a small Alberta town with her sometimes puritanical parents, Daisy experiences a brief, liberating interlude when she stumbles into a career as a singer-pianist with a little swing combo that plays at the local Army base--and eventually at a bigger club in a nearby city.

The film is based in part on Wheeler’s own mother and father, but she’s invented a fictional, mostly subsurface romance between Daisy and her combo’s star instrumentalist: a roving slide trombonist with a dicey past named Max--or Matt--Gramley.

Gramley (Luke Reilly) is the movie’s motor. He’s the one who sparks the band, coaches Daisy, points her in a new direction. He helps her grow from an awkward, amateurish musical dabbler to an accomplished pro entertainer.

He’s an unabashed romantic fantasy, though Reilly--ironically, a TV soap opera regular making his movie debut--does a terrific job of conveying his hip, flip surface and the anguish or alienation that beats beneath it. Max symbolizes the world outside that suddenly beckons--dangerously, enticingly--to women on the WWII home front, a world that turns their lives topsy-turvy, offers the lure of casual promiscuity with departing soldiers, gives them jobs and freedom that may vanish after the war.

Wheeler suggests all this in the scenes involving Daisy, her mother (Kate Reid), her sister-in-law (Robyn Stevan). These three actresses match and play off each other wonderfully; Jenkins and Stevan both won Canadian Oscars for their roles.

And the interaction and undercurrents give this seemingly languorous, unhurried movie tension. These lives and values are settled, traditional, but momentarily disrupted. And we’re always aware, because of the movie’s insistence on a rich social context--that a reckoning or choice is due after the armistice.

It’s a genuine choice, because Wheeler avoids any facile condemnations or finger pointing. She’s empathetic with even the most obnoxious of her characters--drunken, bullying clarinetist-bandleader Slim Godfrey (Stuart Margolin)--and, because of this, “Blues” is never quite predictable.

Even though the aura of romance and nostalgia always remain, it’s not sappy or facile nostalgia. The earthy, richly detailed sets--horse buggies and ‘30s cars on unpaved streets--and the slightly smudgy lyricism of Vic Saran’s cinematography, with its painterly views of Alberta hillsides, help give “Blues” the luminous, dreamily static feel of childhood memories.

“Blues” becomes a lament for those few moments of liberation or love--or even just musicianly camaraderie on stage--that can shine though the seemingly unbroken, inevitable routines of ordinary lives: ties, obligations, the chains of war, class and geography.

It’s a deceptively simple film, but its simplicity is almost a tonic. It’s a movie you can relax into, feel secure about. After about 15 minutes, “Bye Bye Blues” (MPAA rated PG) establishes a center of gravity and holds it.

Wheeler cares deeply about this material, and she has the talent and imagination to convey that feeling without bombast, strain or cliche. Like her heroine, Daisy, she grows right into the music and lets it swing her off the earth; then, sadly, lets it swing her back again.