Where Faith Is Found

Doug Coupland, the Canadian visual artist whose 1991 novel “Generation X” popularized the term, has written a film that just finished a week long run here in Chicago. “Everything’s Gone Green” was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia. Interesting choice. Vancouver – a relatively inexpensive place to shoot a movie or a TV show – often shows up disguised as an American city. In other words, it’s a place where fakery is literally part of the landscape. And that’s what this film is about.

Paulo Costanzo plays a 29-year old slacker named Ryan waking up to the fact that his life is a dreary, lonely wasteland. His girlfriend leaves him, in search of something more than “IKEA Billy shelves,” presumably the sort of life only money can buy. But money is hard to come by in this post-industrial age where nobody actually MAKES things anymore and where even the most loyal workers (like Ryan’s dad) are tossed out onto the street like garbage once they become too old (i.e. expensive) to have around anymore. Besides, Ryan discovers, money doesn’t lead to any sort of promised land. His best friend (an entrepreneurial guy also on the edge of 30 who owns a little dairy company to cover up the fact that he’s operating marijuana franchises all over B.C.) warns him that all those people with the mini-vans and suburban McMansions might look happy but they’re no less lonely or miserable than anybody else. What makes all this even worse, Spike says, is that “We never even learned any words to describe this.”

That’s where Coupland comes in. He does his best to give us words. Or, if not words, at least a compelling set of images. First of all, he takes us behind the set and shows us all the tricks that make us believe we’re watching people live happy, happy lives. Ryan’s brother, the “successful” one in the family, is running a real-estate scam. Ryan’s new blond bombshell of a girlfriend pays her rent by appearing on the online SlutCam four times a day. Ryan’s boss at the Lottery magazine has apparently had a slow brain leak over the 20 years he’s put in behind his dead end desk. And Ryan himself, in spite of the new sports car and slick clothes he’s managed to buy after having been caught up in a scam to sell winning lottery numbers to the Japanese mafia, realizes he’s “never spent a more miserable couple of weeks” in his whole life. The whole deal, Coupland says, is just one big fake. The life we’re living – whoever “we” are – is a fraud. It’s no more real than the “California” palm tree that gets carted around Vancouver whenever they need a shot for whatever movie of the week is being filmed there.

The only (possibly, just maybe) “real” thing in the whole story, Coupland seems to tell us, is…ready for this?...love. Not that it’s easy to find or recognize or hold on to. But Ryan seems to see it in the crazy old knife-wielding Chinese grandmother of the smart, witty, and simply beautiful woman named Ming who he’s got a hopeless crush on. He even sees a glimpse of it between his parents who, in spite of getting arrested in a late-night police raid on their suburban home, seem to fall in love again as they work merrily side by side to make their new marijuana “grow op” (growing operation) a booming success (thanks to Spike’s help and encouragement!). Most of all, Ryan seems to feel it for Ming. And, he hopes, it seems like she feels it for him, too.

That’s how the story “ends,” in fact, with this single word on Ryan’s tongue: Hopeful.

As you might expect from the guy who seared “Gen X” into our cultural consciousness, the movie manages to avoid preachiness. It is, however, surprisingly unpretentious. It doesn’t pretend, in any way, to have discovered something new. Having been born in the same year as Doug Coupland, I know how tempting it is for this generation to imagine we know things no one else has ever been smart enough to figure out. But this film doesn’t make inflated claims.

It’s just the story of a guy who wakes up, sees through the lies his world tells, discovers the promise of something lasting, and decides to live on the edge where faith is found.

If you’re wondering whether or not “the f word” matters in our day, go see “Everything’s Gone Green” when it comes to town. Let me know what you think.