I remember surfing the cable channels one night in the early 2010s when I came across a quaint little movie about an aspiring writer and his attempts to overcome family adversity and escape from the mundane life he felt destined to live. The film was Carl Bessai’s coming-of-age Cole. I remember liking this movie so much that I tried diligently year after year to find a way to add it to my DVD collection. Not only did the task feel impossible, I couldn’t even find a way to rewatch it. It wasn’t available on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Most of the other common streaming services had yet to be established. As my goal is to own the DVD of my top ten favorite movies of each year, I was determined to find this missing piece to complete my 2009 collection. When I randomly found it on Amazon Prime in 2023, I wasted no time renting it. It turns out I would have been better served not seeing the film a second time. Not only has it not aged well, Cole is not nearly as good as I remembered it.

Cole (Richard de Klerk), the film’s protagonist, is a 20-year-old living in Lytton, a small town in western Canada. He assists his older sister, Maybelline (Sonja Bennett), in working the family’s run-down gas station, a business that barely keeps the family afloat. Maybelline has two young children. The oldest is a seven-year-old son named Rocket from a previous interracial relationship. Maybelline currently lives with Bobby (Chad Willett), her racist boyfriend and father of the couple’s toddler daughter. Bobby is hellbent on starting a carwash, despite not having a dime to his name. Bobby is a violent man who takes out his frustration on anyone who gets in his way. But mostly, he takes his anger out on Maybelline, blaming her as the reason why his pipedream hasn’t come to fruition.

Despite Maybelline’s protests and pleads for him not to, Cole applies, is accepted, and enrolls in a creative writing course at a college in Vancouver, some three hours north of Lytton, doing the roundtrip commute in a single day, two or three days a week. In his course, he meets the beautiful Serafina (Kandyse McClure), an introspective but frank woman to who Cole takes an immediate liking. However, Serafina is a woman of color, and, based on her introduction into the film, after we first meet Bobby while also getting an extended look at the primarily White population of Lytton, we know there will be conflict when the city meets Serafina.

Granted, I’ve probably seen over 1000 movies between my first viewing of Cole and my most recent one, but the experience between the two couldn’t have been more different. There won’t be a third viewing in my life. Nevertheless, I won’t discount how much I enjoyed it the first time. As a more seasoned critic and writer, I picked up on many of the film’s flaws that I failed to notice the first time.

Plot 4/10
Character Development 6/10
Character Chemistry 6/10
Acting 6/10
Screenplay 6/10
Directing 5/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 7/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 8/10
66%

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