THE FERRYMAN WILL BE THERE

A third walk on the wild side for Ellis Portal (The Feast of Stephen, 1999, etc.), former judge and former street person, whose police contact, Sgt. Matt West, wants his help mopping up the fallout from the murder of director Charington Simm during the Toronto Film Festival. Simm’s shooting must have been a cunning piece of work, since none of the hundreds of witnesses who saw his car pull up in front of a premiere noticed anything suspicious until Carrie, his daughter and star, saw his body fall to the ground. It’s not the murder he wants Ellis’s help with, Matt insists; it’s Carrie’s disappearance, presumably back into the jungle of street friends and shelters she knew only too well from her days as a runaway. At first Ellis resists. Humbled as he’s been, he has no great desire to return to the streets. But when a meeting that his manipulative old rival John Stoughton-Melville has set up with Ellis’s estranged son Jeffrey goes sour, and a greedy developer seizes his rooming house from under him and his landlady, former girl-gang member Tootie Beets, Ellis, seeing no better options, resigns himself to search for the vanished Carrie and Tootie—and the mysterious “Ferryman” to whom they’re both linked—through a series of nightmare landscapes from the Marble Widow, an uncompleted office building downtown, to his unlamented old stomping ground in the Don River Valley.

The most conventional of Ellis’s three cases, but still heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge for all the once and future homeless.