Goin' Down the Road

Joey and Pete are running from a poverty-stricken region of the Maritimes in a fated attempt to escape a sequence of drab inevitabilities. Of course Toronto can only offer the same sort of job; of course one of them's going to hit a girl on an unlucky night; of course he'll marry her and set up house on hire purchase; he's going to get laid off from work because that's the nature of the work; they're going to huddle in depressing rooms, and argue more and more as the money hits zero; they're going to try robbing a supermarket; something's going to go wrong. The whole inescapable spiral is charted without ever putting an emotional foot wrong. We've all had bad times, but there's usually been something to get us on to the next plateau: luck, background, education. These two have none of this, and Shebib's first feature awakens anger at a society that invites dreams it cannot fulfil, teaching us a bit more about what's wrong.