Crown and Anchor is a 2019 drama about the effects of childhood trauma through the eyes of two estranged cousins.
For a long time, director and co-writer Andrew Rowe‘s debut feature film Crown and Anchor is a troubling story of parallels, tracking the lives of two disparate cousins, though we feel from the start that eventually these roads will cross and not happily. It’s as if we are watching a divided soul, one figure cleft by some otherworldly force, we witness to how each would find some place in this distorted world where it’s just not possible for two of a shared body to occupy the same space. Tragedy looms.
Jimmy (Michael Rowe) is a cop in Toronto, sinewy and angry, pushing his body to its physical limits in efforts to beat back haunts of his past and that of his abusive, alcoholic father. He is barely in control of his rage, having just lost his mother. Then there is Danny (Matt Wells), Jimmy’s cousin, a small-time drug dealer and user in St. John with his own harrowing past, spiraling into an ever widening void, married to Jess (Natalie Brown), the mother of his two children and former girlfriend of Jimmy. A history between them keeps a fire raging and as such, there’s no escaping a fury that will ultimately shape them both.
Crown and Anchor is a bit of a homecoming with Jimmy, returning for his mother’s funeral, and it’s his insertion back into the fold that ignites nearly everything that follows. There is bad blood and then there this what Jimmy did years before that has his whole family divided. It’s this slow reveal and what it means to those at play that give pulse to the crackling screenplay, one that may be naturally a bit familiar but spun with extraordinary tension as the complexities of this deeply wounded family come to bear.
Director Rowe reaches for excess but greatly manages to corral most of the trauma into a harrowing descent of pain and rage, the film spinning a number of plates that never once feel disconnected. That’s made entirely possible by the cast with Michael Rowe (Andrew’s brother) and Matt Wells sinking into the darker recesses of these characters while Brown binds it all together. There’s not a false moment among them, the film patient to a degree as it very purposefully gives each of them time to evolve, even as none of them are willing to do so.
Rowe appears to be staring down the barrel of modern crime thriller movie making, pushing the runtime to two full hours with dialogue (mostly) over action, including a twelve-minute one-on-one that is less about the hyperbolic expectations it feels primed for than the straightforward confrontation it actually becomes. It’s a well-earned moment. One of many.
That’s the real stinger about Crown and Anchor, a movie that presses against convention to tell an authentic struggle of two men who are stunted emotionally, products of consequences bound to each other. This isn’t about redemption but instead accountability, and it’s in this small constrictive circle where it succeeds the most, delivering a powerfully sincere effort that isn’t looking to answer questions because answers don’t matter. Only showing up. Highly recommended.