When you’re a child, your parents should be your tower of strength, your anchor of stability. But what happens when one parent just can’t tow the line?

Not because they refuse to do so, but because they are simply incapable of leading any kind of “normal” life?

That’s the dramatic thrust behind writer/director Joseph Greco’s Canvas, the moving and heartfelt story of 10 year old Chris Marino, and the personal and social agony he endures watching his mother (Marcia Gay Harden) wither under the stranglehold of Schizophrenia.

Playing Chris’s long suffering but unconditionally loving father, John, is much admired character actor Joe Pantoliano. And while Harden gets the showier role as the increasingly agitated mother, the heart and soul of the picture rests in Pantoliano’s subtle, haunted turn, a performance that was fuelled by personal experience.

“Making this film forced me to look at my own situation growing up,” says the actor, whose numerous credits include Memento and The Matrix.

“My mother had an undiagnosed mental disease. At the time I attributed her outbursts to typical Italian-American behavior. We all knew my mom was crazy but we never thought of it as so-called ‘real crazy.’

“All the movies we watched showed mentally ill people as very extreme when in reality it’s much subtler.”

Greco’s gentle, moving film has been garnering positive reviews as a result of North American film festival exposure and a brief U.S. theatrical run last year (the film finally opens in Toronto next Friday). And though Canvas takes a stark and realistic look at the turmoil and despair that mental illness wreaks upon the family unit, the movie’s message is ultimately positive.

“I think Canvas offers hope,” says Pantoliano, “Being involved with it has put me on a path that I’d never expected to travel. I’ve learned so much. Professionally, I did the movie to show my fan base what I could do as an actor and, you know, if this was a big budget Hollywood film, I’d have never have gotten that chance."