TIFF Report: EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN Review

The story structure is very conventional: Does our recently unemployed and re-employed office drone become a corrupt capitalist sellout or a nice touchy feely romantic? This is not so much a flaw, but a clothesline to hang all sorts of messages and images of modern Canadiana out in broad daylight. This is something accomplished very well with Couplands prose and ideas which amazingly seem effortless translated to the screen. Coupland is well known for mixing his philosophy with a fast moving, disposable polymer and silicon culture. Surreal images such as several men in suits reaching out to touch a beached whale on the North Van shore function equally well as a huddle office coworkers viewing TheSlutCam.com in a cubicle. His characters familiar from many of his books, however, here they are less arch and more human, all wonderfully brought to life with a cast of mostly Canadian actors. The title can refer to a host of get-rich quick scams from the lottery, basement marijuana grow-ops, to money laundering golf courses. Ironically most of Canada’s money is not actually green, but you get the point.

For those intimately familiar with Coupland’s universe, or have seen the documentary on his Souvenirs of Canada picture book, it is also fun to spot all the Copland-isms in the background, label-less detergent bottles, Pocky sticks, a tomato shaped beanbag chair, marijuana plants with the first names of female celebrities and a telephone in the shape of a Killer Whale are the essence of ironic Coupland kitsch.  The author clearly loves breaking down stereotypes of Canada, even as he worships them. There is a photography element running though the film which works to underscore this. One collection of stills shown over the course of the movie celebrate the everyday average middle class folk who are have won various lottery sums, even as a later scene shows those pictures to be both fleeting hollow.

For a comedy to attempt to find a niche in the mainstream, the film is very smart and very funny.  I would hope that this film is an entryway to intelligent modern Canadian drama-comedies and that Paul Fox and Douglas Coupland find ways to collaborate in the future. Everything’s Gone Green is light and effervescent enough to makes you want to run out and play some New Pornographers or Sloan or The Odds albums.