Ellen Page stars as Tracey Berkowitz in this Canadian indie, which
was filmed after Juno and was picked up for U.S. distribution
only after Page had scored her Oscar nomination. The plot is generic,
halfway between My So-Called Life and Girl, Interrupted, with an attempt at the regional
self-consciousness of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the
Wedding. Nearly every shot is subsumed into a busy split-screen
grid, an emotionally distancing stunt that I fear is meant to signify
Tracey’s psychic splintering (see the title).
And Tracey isn’t nearly as charming as Juno was. In fact, in anyone
else’s hands, she’d be unbearable. But Page knows just how to ride the
line between irritable and unhinged—and how to dismiss the
movie’s more baroque gestures. The Tracey Fragments never
stops to ask whether Tracey is sane or not. The pleasure is in watching
Page stomp all over any answers.
Dubbed “the titless wonder” at school and little loved at home,
15-year-old Tracey spends her days looking after her little brother,
Sonny, who
behaves continuously like a dog, barking rather than
talking. She’s struck dumb by the cute new kid at school, Billy Zero
(rockabilly musician Slim Twig), who notices and moves quickly to take
advantage of her awe. At some point in the film’s twisty chronology,
Sonny disappears, and Tracey runs away to track him down. She watches
out from the window of a bus, wrapped in a white shower curtain, as she
crisscrosses Winnipeg.
It’s a terrible plot full of ridiculous conceits. But the movie is
not as bad as you’d think it would be. So what if Tracey’s laughing in
one corner of the screen and scowling in the other, or if she seems to
see 30 images of the same streetlamp, the way a fly would? Tracey
doesn’t collapse; she doesn’t splinter. She’s Ellen Page.
