Ryan Gosling can’t be faulted for sticking with one thing. In 2016 alone he was a drunken single father and mildly competent PI in The Nice Guys and a singing and dancing jazzman for La La Land. Next up? A comic book movie, at least of sorts.
Gosling will be tackling Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder, the story of Jack Joseph. Jack is on the verge of fatherhood, something that terrifies him, and in the process of doing his dangerous job, he runs into a supernatural presence that may or may not be the ghost of his father, unfurling a spool of memories good and bad as Jack tries to reconcile his messy relationships and move forward into the next part of his life.
Lemire has been working in comics for years, both writing superheroes for both DC and Marvel while telling more complicated and more personal stories in books like Welder and Essex County. His most recent project to garner notice was Secret Path, a collaboration with musician Gord Downie that explores the tragic death of Chanie “Charlie” Wenjack, a First Nations boy sent to a “boarding school” to force him to assimilate. So, yeah, Lemire tackles some thorny stuff, which tends to line up with Gosling’s taste for complicated roles. Hopefully we’ll see more of this soon, especially with the small-scale Logan poised to tear up theaters this weekend.
