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RSS Feed - ReviewsEverything's Gone Green
By EdwardHavens
April 13th, 2007
When one reads Douglas Coupland, the author of such zeitgeist-capturing works as "Generation X" and "Microserfs," has written an original screenplay, one expects that story to be filled with the quirky characters and situations, the meta dialogue and visual flourishes which have made his books so immensely readable over the years.
While "Everything's Gone Green" does feature some interesting characterizations, a very Coupland-esque storyline and an engaging and winning performance from one-time "Joey" co-star Paulo Costanzo, the blandness of director Paul Fox's execution leaves much to be desired.
The weakness of the visuals is quite surprising, considering Coupland’s almost equal standing in the visual arts field and the deliberate design of many of his best novels. From his first novel, “Generation X” to his most recent, “J-Pod,” Coupland deliberately employs such non-conformist measures as adding text and diagrams to the margins to accentuate the main story or using a variety of typefaces and sizes to emphasize his points. So it is with a puzzling wonderment that the entire look for “Everything’s Gone Green,” in its cinematography and set designs, is so disturbingly plain. Not that a lower-budgeted story about an unmotivated office worker should look like “The Matrix,” but we have seen enough sub-$500,000 films from young American filmmakers which ten times the aesthetic visual value of this film, whose budget was considerably higher, to know that a striking film can be made at a reduced cost. (Rian Johnson’s “Brick” instantly pops into mind, which also featured a much bigger and more well-known cast.)
Costanzo stars as Ryan, a twentysomething slacker in Vancouver who, as the film opens, has just been moved out of his place by his girlfriend (because her therapeutic life coach has helped her realize Ryan is not motivated to awaken the warrior within) and then technically fired from his tech job (for writing and keeping his personal poetry on the company time and servers) when he gets a call from his mother to come home, as his father has just won the lottery. But when it is discovered Dad made a mistake, and he is now homeless and jobless, Ryan accepts the first job that comes his way, which happens to be with the magazine which runs (and writes about) the lottery. He also finds a place to live, in an deserted high rise operated by his brother, as long as he takes care of the building (which should be easy, since no one lives there) and becomes besotted with Ming (Steph Song), a lovely Chinese women working in the Vancouver film industry as a set dresser, who Ryan gets to know better at his Mandarin class after he briefly meets her at a beached whale sighting.
There are moments of the Coupland touch in the visuals (wacky motivational posters, Ryan’s killer whale office phone, a palm tree that travels around the city) and the characters (the pot-growing friends and parents, the strange boss who hires Ryan on the spot because he has good “feng shui,” co-workers who visit porn sites while at work, the golf-course designing boyfriend), but overall the film never comes close to equaling the sum of its parts. Even given the chance to make Vancouver, the author’s hometown, shine as itself instead of the hundreds of other cities filmmakers try to make it emulate (a point of contention with the proudly Canadian Coupland), the film neglects to make the city look like anything unique. Yet, despite its faults, the film still somehow works when it really doesn’t deserve to, thanks mostly in part to Constanzo and Steph, who have some great chemistry. Love, in the Coupland world, is often a bizarre concept, and it would be nice (although strangely un-Coupland-esque) if Ryan and Ming did end up together, even somewhat happily.
Hopefully, should Coupland ever get the itch to write another original screenplay, or even adapt one of his own novels or short stories to the screen, he would also direct the film himself. He wouldn’t be the first novelist-turned-filmmaker, and one suspects with his strong multimedia background he would turn out a much more stimulating film than a Michael Crichton or a Normal Mailer or even a Stephen King. For now, it’s a decent if unspectacular first step into a new medium for him, one his fans should embrace, if only to show there is a desire to see more of his stories on-screen.
My rating: B-