Loyalties

As its title may suggest, LOYALTIES is about friendship and devotion, a theme that movies refrain from treating except most mundanely. Director Wheeler and screenwriter Riis have created a complex and involved story in which the plot is secondary to the delineation of the characters and the changes that occur in their lives. In the backwoods Alberta community of Lac La Biche, Welsh and Wooldridge are a well-to-do English couple resettled from their traditional realm of propriety and tradition to a land of hearty settlers and struggling Indians. Although Welsh's new position at the local hospital is the accepted reason for their move, there is obviously more to thei...