Bones of Crows is ultimately a feature-length Canada Heritage Minute. You know, those little dramatizations that used to play on CBC with often stilted dialogue meant to quickly educate on a certain notable moment of Canadian history. These were meant to make Canada look good, so they would never have touched something like the Residential Schools. But even coming at its material from an adverse angle, writer-director Marie Clements approaches her film from much the same vantage point of education and raising awareness mixed within the bounds of conventional drama. This prerogative is especially apparent by the end, which like those commercials, strives for a kind of catharsis that feels hollow and easy, when nothing about a movie such as this should.
Bones of Crows represents possibly the widest canvas an Indigenous movie has been made on in Canada since Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, and while it is not the first movie to centre on the trauma of the residential school system, it is the first since the 2021 discoveries of mass unmarked graves across the country forced Canada to reckon openly with its history of sustained oppression and specifically this institution of abuse and cultural genocide that persisted for over a century. It is clearly the passion that came out of this renewed understanding that birthed Bones of Crows which (excluding a prologue sequence set in the 1880s) spans eight decades in the life of a survivor, cutting back and forth across time to show the ripple effects of her experience in a residential school.
Grace Dove plays Aline Spears from about sixteen to forty-seven, a Cree girl born on an idyllic homestead in rural Manitoba, later a code-breaker in the Second World War assigned to a special operation in London. Clements juxtaposes these two strands of her life first: the exuberance and freedom of childhood on the open plains with her young romance in Montreal ahead of her recently wed husband Adam (Philip Lewitski) shipping out. But she has a notable scar on her left hand, with which she can’t play the piano like she did as a child. The notice of this spawns the first glimpse into what happened in between.
I’ve actually seen Clements’ previous movie, Red Snow -which played in the 2020 Regina Film Festival, about an Inuit soldier in Afghanistan captured by the Taliban. She’s got solid artistic vision as well as a commendable desire to tell original Indigenous stories on a large scale -the biggest thing holding her back arguably being the inherent cheapness of the Canadian film industry. With Bones of Crows though she tries her damnedest to make up for that; there are sweeping vistas of girls riding horses along the prairie, an early ritual dance sequence on the land shot with that Malick-esque low angle tranquility. There’s some rich lighting in places, starkly a visual contrast with the grotesque dimness of the school sequences. Corners have to be cut here and there -every establishing shot of the school for instance is opaquely digital, but it’s admirable what Clements is able to do with limited resources. The opening sequence, shot in black and white, is especially vivid -I wish more of the movie had adopted such aesthetics.
Clements’ visual aspirations often come at the relief of her narrative, which for its compelling ambition and conviction, can be clumsily delivered. The script is very heavy-handed, and for subject matter like this, it arguably earns the right to be; but there is a detrimental impact this take has on the tone and flow of the piece. The script is very concerned that the audience gets how bad residential schools and the institutions that ran them were, to the point of holding their hand in a way that nothing gets lost. There’s a dinner scene of the school officials where the course of conversation inorganically turns into a history lesson on the origins of the system, being sure to point out how the “Final Solution” term of genocidal rhetoric was used by Indian Affairs superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott long before Hitler adopted it. The movie features several of these poorly-articulated moments of historical context that never fail to distract from the personal stakes and immediacy of Aline’s story, who in spite of Dove’s best efforts, is less and less real each time her narrative is resumed.
In addition to this, there are a number of ill-advised choices made in service of plot and theme. For instance, an all-to-brief plotline focused on Aline’s sister Perseverance (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), who suffered sexual abuse as a child, turned to sex work, and was incarcerated in the 1960s before disappearing –believed by Aline to have been murdered by a client in a scene that plays out in a highly tonally awkward way. There’s an unexplored bit of drama around Perseverance feeling abandoned by Aline, due to being left out of a childhood escape attempt, but generally it is subsumed by her status as avatar for an alternative tragic fate for residential school survivors. When it comes to themes of sexual assault, Clements clearly wants to portray the horrible truth undiluted, but she fumbles her characterization of it in possibly irresponsible ways –subtextually linking it to sex work or aestheticizing it (the way she employs the film’s crow motif over one instance for example). There’s one gross sequence that attempts to if not redeem at least reconcile one nun’s cruelty because she too was abused, ultimately allowing for a white woman savior and the insinuation that the feminine white and indigenous experiences are comparable under the oppression of a single simply-defined patriarchy. It’s not the first time the movie makes such a problematic statement, earlier equating the residential school experience directly to the Holocaust when Adam helps liberate a concentration camp.
Allusions and developments like these undercut the movie’s authenticity, in spite of how concerned it is with relating the truth of this mass travesty –and in the ending beats, set in 2009, almost decimate it entirely. It’s understandable that Clements would want a catharsis for this lifetime’s story she’s telling, but it comes about in the most bewilderingly contrived way that satiates a kind of fantasy revenge at odds with the track of the story and the movie’s conviction. It’s an easy resolution, far from the reality for survivors that is still so painful and difficult.
Where Bones of Crows is at its best is in its articulation of how residential school trauma persists through the decades. It perhaps does this most successfully through Adam, both haunted by the experience and gradually worn down by his unequal treatment at the hands of the government. There’s perhaps a more cutting narrative to be explored in how that residential school trauma is inherited, how its ramifications pass down through generations. But to do that would mean making Aline a less wholly virtuous character, more scarred in ugly ways. The movie is not disingenuous though, it cares deeply about its need to relate this important story, and do so in an ambitious, broadly transcendent way. It is structurally, conceptually very compelling, and dotted within it are several interesting indigenous stories in their own right. Yet Bones of Crows takes on too much, is ill-equipped to translate its points of fact, and is even marred by a degree of contextual blindness that gives way to a weakened thesis. A noble effort to grapple with a shameful subject, but not an effective one.
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