Saint Ralph

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Saint Ralph (Odeon Films) is a cornball movie about a fourteen-year-old boy named Ralph who attends a Catholic boys’ school in Hamilton. At school Ralph is the butt of his classmates’ jokes, and out of school he must cope with his mother’s serious illness (she slips into a coma early in the movie). But he remains an optimist, and when, as punishment for smoking on school grounds, he’s assigned to the cross-country running team, he sets out to win the 1954 Boston Marathon even though he’s just a scrawny grade nine kid. He gets no support from anyone except a man dressed as Santa Claus, who appears to Ralph in the darkest hours, and Dennis Longboat, the author of the book Secrets to Marathon Success, whose voiceover follows Ralph over hill and dale and who is rumoured to have gone mad. Eventually a priest from the school, who happens to be an ex-marathoner, becomes Ralph’s trainer and it’s all uphill and downhill from there. The terrific soundtrack features Ron Sexsmith, Blue Rodeo, Joel Plaskett and Gord Downie (who sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as Ralph fights to the finish). I won’t tell you how it all comes out except to say that even the cranky old headmaster (played by Gordon Pinsent) comes around. The film is an uplifting evocation of the 1950s, when people had time to listen to a two- or three-hour marathon on live radio (okay, that’s a bit of literary licence), and it will leave you wishing you had been there—and if you were there, it will leave you wishing life had really been like that.