Artsculture

The Most Vancouver Movie Ever Made

Coupland's 'Everything's Gone Green' tweaks the city's film identity.

By Charles Campbell, 29 Sep 2006, TheTyee.ca

Everything's Gone Green

Paul Costanzo stars in 'Everything's Gone Green.'

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There was a time when B.C. in general and Vancouver in particular desperately wanted just one movie -- good, bad or indifferent -- that reflected our own image. Twenty-six years ago, no average person could name one.

Then, in 1982, the late, great Phil Borsos made The Grey Fox, a treacly period charmer about a real-life small-time American train robber named Billy Miner who came north and was so polite Canadians adopted him as one of their own. In 1985, Sandy Wilson made My American Cousin -- a sweet, slight confection that pretty much defined the Okanagan circa 1960.

Then came the boom in foreign film production, and we pathetically obsessed over places we could recognize in otherwise very American films. In 1987, Stakeout gave us lovely old houses on Stephens Street in Kitsilano (hey, look, it's my dad's old place), while Roxanne offered Steve Martin as a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac in a particularly picturesque Nelson.

Since then, of course, the developing wealth of Canadian talent has carved time out from Hallmark movies and cable-channel serials to make an enormous number of films that represent us and belong to us. Name one. Ah yes, I thought so.

And so we come to the 2007 edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs Sept. 28 to Oct. 13 (and began in the year The Grey Fox was released). The festival features four films in which Vancouver plays itself. The most anticipated is Everything's Gone Green, written by Doug Coupland. Another is Mount Pleasant, directed by Ross Weber and featuring ubiquitous local film actors Ben Ratner and Tygh Runyan.

Acts of Imagination, about Ukrainian immigrant siblings driving each other crazy in a cheap suburban apartment, and Unnatural & Accidental, based on the true story of a man who murdered destitute women by pouring alcohol down their throats, round out the group. The former finds fleeting beauty in a few scenes beside the Port Mann Bridge in November, but it's mainly dour and overwrought. The latter, yet to be screened for the media, is likely to be a special interest.

The Vancouver obsession

Everything's Gone Green, however, is the most Vancouver movie ever made. It obsesses over our appearances the way we obsess over our own.

As with pretty much all Coupland stories, the characters are ciphers. Ryan (Paul Costanzo) plays a disaffected technical writer trying to find his place in a beautiful young city defined mainly by its citizens' illusions, pretensions and opportunism. He gets a job photographing and profiling lottery winners, becomes embroiled in a money-laundering scheme, and falls for Ming (Steph Song), a movie set dresser. They're rather bland stand-ins for the audience in a story where every other character is a Vancouver caricature.

No one better identifies the particularities of Vancouver's zeitgeist than Coupland. He knows that real estate is Vancouver's only industry. That our landscape's beauty places special demands on its occupants. That, like 30-year-old Ryan, the city is in the process of deciding what it wants to be when it grows up.

Never have so many elements of our city been brought together in one movie package. Rory the steroid dealer declares "I only ate 11 grams of fat last week." Film production trucks and Halloween Martians invade a North Shore residential neighbourhood. Feng shui, "the Quebec situation," animal rights, leaky condos, Expo 86, home invasions, a beached whale -- Coupland seems to be making up for past absence with all the local references.

It can feel like a laundry list, and there are times when you wish the film were populated with more believable people. Still, many scenes linger in the mind, and in 10 or 50 or 100 years, people will watch this film to understand what life was like here way back when. God knows how the movie will play outside our city, but Vancouverites will like it well enough.

And then there's real life

Mount Pleasant offers a more naturalistic take on Vancouver's current moment. Again, wealth and the lack of it are central to the story. It's about the intertwined lives of three couples: a 16-year-old prostitute and her tool-thief boyfriend, a middle-class Mount Pleasant couple coping with fear for the health of their young daughter after she punctures herself with a discarded syringe, and a wealthy west-side family comprised of a brittle, moralizing wife and her husband, the john.

While Everything's Gone Green depends on metaphors, Mount Pleasant thrives on its characters. If you live on that side of Vancouver, you may recognize these people as your neighbours. They're certainly mine. Three doors down from me near Commercial Drive are the parents of a young girl who found a syringe in their backyard. By the SkyTrain station is the junkie prostitute who looks like she just fell down the hole -- and might yet climb out. The immaculate Point Grey homes occupied by oblivious parents and smart-but-vulnerable kids are an uncomfortable reminder of my own teens.

While the moments of recognition in Everything's Gone Green make you laugh, those in Mount Pleasant make you wince.

For Vancouverites looking for their own city's reflection on a movie screen, both films are worth seeing. Everything's Gone Green will find a home in the local canon. Mount Pleasant will likely settle for second place, along with a host of deserves-better Vancouver films like Last Wedding and Kitchen Party.

Even Everything's Gone Green may not stand much of a chance in the wider world, though. But that's okay. As a city, we spend too much time seeking the approval of others. And enough of us are sufficiently rich that we can afford to make a few movies just for ourselves.

Charles Campbell is a contributing editor to The Tyee. He also likes Double Happiness (Mina Shum, 1994), Kissed (Lynne Stopkewich, from a Barbara Gowdy script, 1996), and Hard Core Logo (Bruce McDonald, from a Michael Turner novel. He thinks Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter is the best film set in B.C., even though it is based on a book by Russell Banks originally set in upstate New York. Hey, turnabout is fair play. What British Columbia films matter to you?

For The Tyee's profile of Douglas Coupland, see Coupland's Mid-life Circus. For Dorothy Woodend's survey of other worthy film festival attractions, see Must-See Bad News and And Now the Good News. [Tyee]

Charles Campbell edited the Georgia Straight weekly for 11 years, and helped to establish the venerable alternative newspaper as an influential and respected voice in the Vancouver media. As the Vancouver Sun's entertainment editor, he increased the section's readership by more than 30 percent in two years. Most recently, he served on the Sun's editorial board.

As an editor and writer he's been closely involved in work that has won more than 60 awards. In 2000, he was honoured with a Southam Fellowship by the University of Toronto's Massey College.

12 Comments:

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  • dude

    5 years ago

    Comments on "The Most Vancouver Movie Ever Made"

    Thanks for the balanced review Charles. I am really tired of the self-aggrandizing Doug telling us this is the first movie made in Vancouver set in vancouver (and the media just eating it up and repeating it) -the favourite of mine made and set in Vancouver is Nathaniel Geary's On The Corner -about life at Main and Hastings-far away from the British Properties where Doug lives -so I guess out of sight out of mind.

    The films of Bruce Sweeney are also excellent looks at vancouver, I particularly liked Babz Chula as a Kitsilano dope dealing, sex crazed grandma.

    I wonder why Doug with all his succes has never been more inclusive in promoting others beyond himself.

  • nquastel

    5 years ago

    Actually much better films then ANY of the one's listed above, and set in East Van and completely shot on location, is My Father's Angel (1999) which, deals with conflicts between Serbian and Croatian refugees. Also, Carl Bessai's Lola, set in the downtown eastside. Funny thing about both those movies: Smart, well done, full of integrity, and refusing to be second rate copies of Hollywood.

  • Charles Campbell

    5 years ago

    Can't speak to either of these films, although it should be noted that Unnatural & Accidental is also by Bessai. Nor have I seen last year's On the Corner, which got some pretty positive notices. There are many good films set in Vancouver, some of which I did mention, that aren't thought of as quintessential Vancouver movies because they're about subcultures, and don't really undertake to explore the city's (often white) mainstream life. (That's certainly not fair to Double Happiness, which is a very Vancouver movie.)

    As such, and because our distribution system is so dysfunctional, they don’t enter the wider public’s mindset.

    That’s not true, mind you, for the Da Vinci iterations, slightly dressed up to make it on international TV, and the odd documentary like Nettie Wild’s Fix, which sure deserved its accolades. They both show that it’s possible to make something that resonates here and elsewhere.

    We’ve got lots of books that do that; why do we have so few films? Money, of course, but we’re due. We have the talent.

    On another note, if you want images from False Creek’s industrial history, try Phil Borsos’s Nails and Cooperage, available from the NFB and likely also from really good video stores such as Videomatica. Anyone with a taste for BC history should see them, as well as Borsos’s Spartree.

  • darcy.mcgee

    5 years ago

    Vancouver doesn't have its own image. Instead, it seems that we model our view of it in opposition to what other cities are.

  • rotlin

    5 years ago

    Well written article.

    Honourable mention can be given to the movie Last Wedding which is a Bruce Sweeney film about troubled relationships set in Vancouver.

    I also enjoyed Hard Core Logo as a Canadian road trip movie.

  • snert

    5 years ago

    Ahhhh, Vancouver, the city whose flower should be the Narcissus.

  • G West

    5 years ago

    dude
    Because Doug, when he looks into the stillness of the pool, likes to see nothing but his own reflection staring back at him. Anyone who followed his recent (August I think) epistolary account of several 'years in the life' in the New York Times would have no trouble understanding that.

    Besides, apart from a few folks here at Tyee, no one cares anymore – if they ever did. Perhaps we could rename it ‘Generation eXtraneous’

    The guy is insufferable.

  • charling

    5 years ago

    Good review. Thanks also for mentioning the difference between Vancouver's sub-culture films vs. more mainstream ones. I really CAN'T think of any films that have been as "mainstream" as this one before...

    The film definitely did have a lot of stereotypes and generalizations about who Vancouverites are. Taken at face value it basically says that Vancouverites can be very unmotivated and shallow at times, but also unique individuals who sleep walk through their lives occasionally being interrupted by green aliens on the set of an abundance of movie sets crowding their space; that sometimes we are not always able to shake this feeling of mist and clouds and rain that surrounds us because our heads are too foggy from all that pot-smoke floating around.

    As much as I’d like these identities to be explored more, there's a part of me (I think like a lot of Vancouverites) that knows that they’ll never be completely right or accurate if brought to the screen. I'm sure people in bigger cities that do get over-represented have felt this way at some point too. Coupland's representation is only one person's opinion (although slightly aggrandized) and I'm hopeful others get a chance to explore their views on film too, with much less "caricature" making. I'm not sure I want this to be one of the only mainstream representation of the city we have on film when we look back at this period 20-30 years down the road. Although I did actually like the movie (one of my favourite scenes was the sequence at Grouse Grind when one character casually defines the masses coming up the mountain) I still think we can do much better than this.

  • nquastel

    5 years ago

    Douglas Coupland's success is largely attributable, I think, to having discovered that a literary career can be made of (i) recognizing Vancouver, and Canada's general insecurity about its identity, and (ii) utilizing the Forer effect.

    Wikipedia entry for this effect begins: The Forer effect (also called personal validation fallacy or the Barnum effect after P. T. Barnum) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. The Forer effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some pseudosciences such as astrology, graphology, and fortune telling.

  • dude

    5 years ago

    thanks for that nquatsel. I feel Doug appropriates public sentiment-Terry Fox prime example, yes it was for a good cause-Doug,that is-but millions and millions of Canadians have ran for and appreciated Fox-well before what's his name-Doug wrote cut lines besides photos the Fox family understandably supplied...

    he is an upper class blue blooded conservative flattering the middle class-his market- and an old fashioned 'modern'

    he has become what he so desperately always wanted to be-

    be careful what you wish for?-

  • dude

    5 years ago

    ps his inability to write characters - is something I've always noticed about his work he really doesn't undertsand people and is simply the bug,er fly on the wall.he has an instinct for demographics and plays to it

    lately he calls his work experiemntal now, ah come on -'get with it don't persecute me cuz I'm experimental'-

    Michael Turner is experimental and he understands and writes characters- Pornographers Poem also dealt with issues of class all in a taught novel-

    okay readers favourite Vancouver writer?
    I'll start with Zsusuzi Gartner

  • Skookum1

    5 years ago

    Quote:
    Ahhhh, Vancouver, the city whose flower should be the Narcissus.

    Adapting that for the local biome, the corresponding water-flower here would be the skunk cabbage.

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