Seven Oaks Magazine.

You would have to be a pretty humourless Vancouverite not to enjoy Paul Fox’s Everything’s Gone Green. With a screenplay written by the North Shore’s own ubiquitous Douglas Coupland, tons of great shots of the City of Vancouver (playing itself for a change), and a charming cast of actors, the film is indeed emerging as a hometown favourite at this year’s VIFF.

The absurdist but more-than-a-grain-of-truth plot and characters bear all the hallmarks of Coupland’s work – and mercifully, the writer does not insert himself into the story like he did in his most recent novel, Jpod.

The story here revolves around a nearly-thirty young man adrift and alienated from a society that seems to be nothing but fake and delusional. After quitting his mind-numbing job on false news that his family had won the lottery, Ryan, played by Paulo Costanzo (of the now thankfully-cancelled sitcom Joey) ends up with a bizarre job as propagandist for Winners, the lottery’s promotional magazine. He soon finds himself embroiled in corruption, and alienated from an increasingly eccentric family caught up in their own illegal schemes. Nothing about the economy of this fictional Vancouver is “real”. Even Ryan’s romantic interest, for instance, has a job with movie productions, making-over Vancouver to look like various unlikely U.S. cities.

The comedy works for the local audience, but it is hard to say whether a non-Canadian or even non-West coast audience will get it in the same way. The performances from the leads should be universally appreciated; Constanzo has something of a Zach Braff-like presence on screen, equally cute but more sincere and less annoying.

Vancouver, though, is the real star of the film and it performs well, if a little unrealistically. Coupland’s surreal screenplay doesn’t try to comment on the surreal coexistence of rampant homelessness and the endless boosterism fueling an absurd real estate bubble. You can spot a lot of your favourite Vancouver haunts in this film, but you won’t see anything from the Downtown Eastside. Like much of Coupland’s fiction, then, Everything’s Gone Green pokes fun at the middle class – with its mundane suburban culture, alienated office environments and amoral pursuit of wealth – but stops short of anything that would make that middle class audience too uncomfortable.

With complaints registered, one still has to admit that this is a laugh out loud, feel good film. Everything’s Gone Green promises to make some green, at least in its Canadian release. Who knows, it might even prompt more Hollywood producers to let Vancouver play itself more often.