WRITER WENT OUT ON A LIMB WITH `HANGING GARDEN'.

Byline: Ted Loos The New York Times

When Thom Fitzgerald refers to his first feature film, ``The Hanging Garden,'' as ``a goofy riff on the gay suicide movie,'' don't be put off. Fitzgerald, a 29-year-old writer and director, is merely demonstrating his darkly comic side, which is also evident throughout his movie, highly serious as it is.

Made in Nova Scotia, ``The Hanging Garden'' is equal parts surrealist fantasy and kitchen-sink drama, with sardonic humor sprinkled into almost every scene. In a more serious moment, Fitzgerald described the movie this way: ``It's about a family that got cruelly and ironically stuck together on this planet, and figuring out how to love one another.''

The film, which opens today at Laemmle's Sunset 5 in West Hollywood and Landmark's NuWilshire in Santa Monica), won the audience award and the award for best Canadian feature at the Toronto Film Festival in September and was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It won four Genies, the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars, and was fairly successful at the box office in Canada, grossing about $1 million. ``It didn't play at art houses,'' Fitzgerald pointed out. ``It played at the mall.''

An art house would be the more likely home for the film, which asks viewers to consider a central act - a gay, severely overweight teen-ager, William, commits suicide by hanging himself from a tree - both as if it happened and as if didn't happen. In the second alternative, the boy leaves home, loses weight and gets a boyfriend. The two versions of the past then collide in the present.

Although this approach may seem to derive from Latin American fiction or the films of Luis Bunuel, the director has another explanation. ``I had a very strong and profound surrealist influence - Catholicism,'' said Fitzgerald, who has the round, cherubic face of a choirboy. ``Anyone who was raised Catholic understands a nonliteral interpretation of the world around us.''

Fitzgerald grew up mostly in Bergenfield, N.J. He attended Cooper Union in New York, but at the age of 19 he transferred to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. He has lived there since, contributing to the city's growing arts scene as actor, performance artist and maker of experimental short films.

He started writing the script for ``The Hanging Garden'' five years ago, working from his own experience of estrangement. ``I lived far away from my family - a thousand miles away,'' he said. ``At a certain point, I really felt the distance. I hadn't seen any of them in a long time. I fantasized about the much-dreamed-of reconciliation and reunion, and I thought: `Ah heck, I'll just write a movie about it. It'll be much easier.'''

What resulted is anything but easy. When, after 10 years away, William returns home for his sister's wedding, he has to confront a decidedly dysfunctional family: an Alzheimer's-plagued grandmother, Grace; an abusive, alcoholic father, Mac; a despairing mother, Iris, and a frazzled, outspoken sister, Rosemary. (The role of Rosemary is played at different stages by two of Canada's best-known actresses, Sarah Polley of ``The Sweet Hereafter'' and Kerry Fox of ``Welcome to Sarajevo.'')

Gradually, William realizes that the other members of his family share his nightmarish vision of the past: the image of his body hanging from a tree. A flashback helps explain his reasons for leaving (or killing himself); these include his obesity, his being struck by his father and the fact that his mother, trying to redirect his emerging sexuality, paid a local woman to seduce him.

In the present, all parties seek some sort of resolution. Through it all, the father obsessively tends a beautiful flower garden, and the flowers, with their capacity for death and rebirth, provide the film with visual and narrative structure.

While Fitzgerald acknowledges sharing some traits with his protagonist, the film is not autobiographical in its depiction of a troubled family. ``It was a very volatile household - not for the same reasons and not in the same way,'' Fitzgerald said of his own upbringing. ``The father in the family is not my father, by any stretch.'' His parents were divorced when he was very young, and he grew up mostly with his mother and his stepfather.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) Peter MacNeill, right, and Chris Leavens are an estranged father and son in ``The Hanging Garden.''

(2) Thom Fitzgerald: ``The father in the family is not my father, by any stretch.''