1993 Directed by Atom Egoyan
A look into the life of troubled former hockey player Brian Spencer, who got into problems both on the ice and off because of his temper. The film also has a close focus on Spencer's father, and shows how he influenced Brian's life both before and after his death.
A hyper-obscure (this is the 2nd Letterboxd review) TV movie from a pre-Exotica Atom Egoyan that is paradoxically available on Amazon right now*. How and why everyone's least favorite mega-corporation got the rights to this is anyone's guess, but a better question might be how Egoyan got the gig in the first place, as he's about as non-intuitive a choice for a sports biopic, even one this lurid (it's about hockey player Brian Spencer, who was fired from the NHL for his temper and then ended up on trial for murder a decade later), as I can think of. Still, while Gross Misconduct is clearly for-hire work, and has a tendency to lapse into on-the-nose made-for-TVisms ("Who are you?" "I'm…
In which my auteurist obsessiveness once again leads me to some unlikely places (see also the time I watched a documentary about a baseball coach for Linklater). “There’s a whole lot of ways of going through life casually, but I never did. I never found those ways, I never have been much of a casual person.” Spencer’s inevitable, drug-and-rage-fueled demise is the common stuff of tawdry rise-and-fall biopic, with the obligatory with-success-comes-debauchery montage and all. But Egoyan makes this far stranger and haunting than he had any right to. Repeated monologues delivered directly to the camera by a young Brian even evoke something of Watkins’s anti-biopic strategies; the cherubic boy speaking so calmly and knowingly about all the ways the…
Viewed on YouTube
Brian Spencer was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs
in the 1969 NHL Draft.
December 12, 1970 he called his father in Fort St. James B.C. to tell him he would be playing his first NHL game for The Maple Leafs and that the game will be televised and that he is also getting interviewed during the second intermission.
What happened after that is something quite strange and tragic, so is the rest of Brian Spencer's life.
All this was new to me.
By the time I started following the Maple Leafs, Brian Spencer retired from playing hockey.
Being a life long Toronto Maple Leaf fan,
I'm surprised I never heard this story.
This Made-For-TV- movie written by Paul Gross and directed by Atom Egoyan is not very good, but I'm happy it exists.
If you are interested, seek this one out on YouTube.
A riveting look at the violent life of pro hockey player Brian Spencer. The film has an eerie quality and it sort of reminded me of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer the more it went on. I believe this was a Canadian TV movie but for a TV movie it's intense.
