The Steps: Christine Lahti interview
A dysfunctional family's reunion at a lake house in
Northern Ontario descends into chaos, in this ensemble comedy-drama from
Canadian director
Andrew Currie (
Fido), starring
James Brolin,
Emmanuelle Chriqui,
Christine Lahti and
Jason Ritter.
Residents of
Canada and the United States generally take a certain pride in sharing the world's longest unprotected border.
Close to the surface, though, lie repressed resentments and frustrations, and these are amusingly assessed within the microcosm of this step-family comedy-drama from director Andrew Currie.
As
The Steps opens, we meet failed investment banker
Jeff (Jason Ritter) and his party-animal sister
Marla (Emmanuelle Chriqui),
New Yorkers who've been invited by their publishing-magnate father,
Ed (James Brolin), to visit his cottage in Northern Ontario. They're infuriated, terrified and appalled — to them,
Canada is even a bigger wasteland than
Wyoming. Since their father married
Sherry (Christine Lahti), a woman with a chequered past and children by three different men, they've been worried they may never see any of their father's fortune.
Jeff and Marla head for
Georgian Bay and find that things are worse than anticipated. Sherry's crew of offspring would have to step up their game seriously just to reach the "motley" level.
Keith (
Steven McCarthy) is an unemployed musician who was kicked out of the emerging band and he was in;
Samir (
Vinay Virmani) is a pot dealer and full-time stoner; and though eldest son
David (
Benjamin Arthur) may have the second-largest paintball field in all of
Ontario, he also seems to have fairly serious rage issues. And now Sherry and Ed are planning on a few changes to their family that may leave Jeff and Marla out in the cold.
Mocking peculiar obsessions and peccadilloes on both sides of the border,
Currie (who made the memorable zombie comedy Fido, which premiered at the
Festival in
2006) and his fine cast have an enormous amount of fun skewering everything from
Americans' less appealing dietary habits to
Canada's love of
Nickelback. Brolin and
Lahti have an enormous amount of fun as love-struck newlyweds, as do Ritter and Chriqui as Ed's snotty and entitled kids, and the supporting cast attacks their roles with gusto (especially
Arthur as always-angry
Canadian nationalist David). As lingering bitterness and current disappointments wreak havoc in the cottage and disaster looms, threatening even Ed and Sherry's idyllic happiness, these strangers slowly, and hilariously, figure out how to become a family.
Bonnie Laufer Krebs @movi_boni spoke with Christine Lahti about how she found herself in this Candian film and working with this amazing cast.