The Worst Movie about Maine

Here in  the Acadia area there are many locally made movies to choose from. There’s no mistaking it, A Lobster Tale (2006) is the worst movie about Maine I’ve ever seen. First of all, the main character is played by Colm Meaney, known to Star Trek: Next Generation and Deep Space Nine fans as Miles O’Brien. Not only did he have to shed his Irish brogue, but he had to adopt a working class Maine fisherman’s accent to play the part of  Cody Brewer. He didn’t succeed. Neither did his screen wife Alberta Watson, who only started with a Toronto accent. A few painful “ahs” at the ends of words ending with “r” just don’t make it. I checked out the website for the movie and now they’re saying it’s about a New England lobsterman, so I guess they heard the criticism.

I could have ignored the accents if I could have fallen into the story line enough to believe it. The plot was about as stupid and far-fetched as I could have imagined. A down on his luck lobster fisherman, who can’t even get his outboard started pulls up a (wooden!!) trap with a clump of moss growing on it. The moss turns out to instantly heal any human ailment (including regrowing severed limbs) while emitting a blinding halogen light. Right. Amazingly, the screenwriter never bothered to find out that moss doesn’t grow under saltwater. I guess if it can heal and emit halogen light, it can grow under saltwater. Seems like they could have called it seaweed, but employing a common sense fact check person wasn’t in the budget.

But wait, there’s more. You’d think that a movie about Maine would be filmed here. After all, the scenery is free and help is cheap. But no. This was a Canadian production so we get Nova Scotia. I love Nova Scotia, don’t get me wrong, but the scenery is just….different. Different boats, different shoreline, different houses. So close but no cigar. It ain’t Maine.

As the story develops, word gets around about the magic healing moss and everybody in town wants a piece to cure their warts, etc. The poor fisherman is offered a huge sum of money by a drug company, refuses and sets the moss in a jar in his living room. Whaddya know, someone steals it. The best part of the movie comes in the form of the quirky, littering Native American sheriff played by Graham Greene, who pursues the case in a comical way that almost rescues the movie.In the end, nothing really changes except that everyone feels good, mostly because the movie is over. The scenery is beautiful, but not Maine. The people are interesting, but not Mainers. The plot is awful; a weird combination of Disney fantasy and adult themes wrapped up with an unsatisfying conclusion. They could have called it a movie about a Nova Scotia lobster fisherman and avoided the accent and scenery problems. But they would have only been halfway there.

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