Don McKay is a 2009 independent drama thriller film written and directed by Jake Goldberger and starring Thomas Haden Church and Elisabeth Shue. It premiered at the 8th Annual Tribeca Film Festival in April 2009 and received a limited release on April 2, 2010.
Don McKay (Thomas Haden Church) is a lonely high school janitor who one day receives a letter from his high school sweetheart, Sonny (Elisabeth Shue). In it, she asks him to come visit her back in their home town, because she is dying of an unnamed disease. At first he is reluctant because he had been a suspect in a murder case there years before, but Don decides to go. He arrives and gets a ride to Sonny's house by an eccentric cab driver named Samuel (M. Emmet Walsh).
Don meets Sonny, as well as her strange caregiver Marie (Melissa Leo). Marie's coldness towards Don makes it clear that she doesn't approve of his presence. Don spends the night, and he and Sonny make love. The next morning, Sonny's Doctor, Lance Pryce (James Rebhorn) visits. While Marie and Sonny are out, Pryce attacks Don, and after a struggle, Don kills the man, and hides the body in a bed of leaves behind the garden. However, Don had just suffered an allergic reaction to a bee sting, and blacks out shortly after hiding the body. He awakens in the hospital, where Sonny proposes marriage and claims that she had recently spoken to Pryce.
Don McKay, CM (born 1942) is a Canadian poet, editor, and educator.
Mckay was born in Owen Sound, Ontario and raised in Cornwall, McKay was educated at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Wales, where he earned his PhD in 1971. He taught creative writing and English for 27 years in universities including the University of Western Ontario and the University of New Brunswick.
In 2008, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.
McKay is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Long Sault (1975), Lependu (1978), and Apparatus (1997). He has twice won the Governor General's Award, for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000). In June 2007, he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip (2006).
McKay, published since 1973, is described as ' a poet with a patient eye, an acute arresting ear, over flowing with details of ornithology, botany, weather, industry, books and music; nuanced descriptions ,philosophical phrasing, folksy idiom. madcap humour and elegy'. Others , consider 'awe, astonishment and wonder to be the keynotes of McKay's poems and poetics' and that his prime subject matter to be 'the workings of the human mind'.