The same week that brought Bruce La Bruce’s Skin Gang to video came another Canadian Nazi flick, though this tube-born offering has considerably less flesh on its bones.  Sarah Polley (who did about two dozen unnoticed flicks up north before getting some acclaim here with The Sweet Hereafter) stars as a high school student whose disparaging comment at a school gathering regarding having to learn another language to get a job causes the anti-hate speaker to chastise her.  She takes her anger to the internet, where she finds several similar-minded individuals in NIM, the National Identity Movement, that are equally concerned about reverse-racism.

Things start out fine.  The characters Polley meets don’t seem to be the cliché Hollywood one-dimensional skinheads writers drag out every time they need a racist/sexist/homophobic villain.  In particular, the head of the organization is played by Lynn Redgrave(!), and her performance could easily have carried the film.

    In fact, the movie seems to be (gosh!) on the verge of making a point about reverse-racism, and how it can be just as bad as the traditional kind.  The ant-hate speaker even seems to be a gross caricature, and when he speaks, the flick totters on the edge of a scathing right-wing satire.  Spoken in response to the P.C.-fication of Christmas, the line “We’re so afraid of offending anybody we’ve dumped own culture” seems to be a step in a potentially interesting direction.

    Then everything goes wrong.

    Instead of sticking to showing that not all folks concerned about racism towards Caucasians are hairless, Swastika-wearing cross-burners, they quickly succumb to their own P.C. pressure and throw any potential controversy to the wind.  The characters distribute white power pamphlets on a bus, blow up a church, claim “there were no ovens” at Auschwitz, and Polley and her dumb-and-rude-as-hell-so-it’s-completely-unbelievable-that-she’d-have-any-interest-in-him boyfriend have sex on a Nazi flag!

    Polley’s character, meanwhile, has become a major writer of white power propaganda under a pseudonym, and is being pressured to go public.  When she finally does, there’s the prerequisite aloofness of her friends and family, but Polley, being the “nice girl,” doesn’t even try to justify herself.  Her best friend ends up in jail for a crime committed by her gang.  It all ends in proper TV-movie fashion, with Polley and the anti-hate speaker joining forces.

    While it’s a bit comforting to know that TV-movies may be, in fact, even duller and less controversial on the other side of the border, that doesn’t make White Lies any more bearable.  The performances are good, and the actual film looks nice (Skogland later directed the okayish Children of the Corn 666), but the whole thing is just too focused on its own political agenda to bring you anything resembling entertainment.  Throughout the film, large signs and billboards with the word “THINK” on them are pictured, but it seems to be a bit of irony on the filmmakers’ part in this case; they’ve done all the thinking for you.