The Hanging Garden
From Academic Kids
- See Hanging Gardens of Babylon for the World Wonder.
The Hanging Garden is a 1997 British/Canadian movie written and directed by Thom Fitzgerald that is about the duality of life and death and the way seemingly very different choices in life can lead to similar outcomes.
25-year-old Sweet William (Chris Leavins) returns to his parents' house after ten years of absence to attend the wedding of his sister. It is revealed that he was once a gay, obese teenager (played by Troy Veinotte), who was caught having sex with his bisexual friend in the garden by his grandmother when he was 15.
As a consequence of the ensuing rejection, partcicularly by his father, Sweet William had the choice of either running away to live in a big city far away from the family or committing suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the garden.
In the movie, both the alive, now slender and self-assured Sweet William and the obese, suffocated teenage Sweet William, hanging as a fresh corpse in the garden, are present and interacting. In the version of reality where Sweet William dies, his family members cannot shed their memories of his death and carry on with their lives, whereas in the other version Sweet William is haunted by memories of his father's misbehavior and is unable to reconcile with him.
The cast also includes Sarah Polley, Peter MacNeill, Seana McKenna and Ashley MacIsaac.
