Unsuspecting Circumstances
(Lifehouse – Blind)

So Douglas Coupland has a screenplay showing at the Toronto Film Festival this year. The one year I have chosen not to get tickets. Total bummer. Hopefully I can catch it when it comes out on video. Here’s a little synopsis of his movie.

Pyramid schemes, monster grow-ops and lucrative white lies: you're either in the game or getting played. Set in a Vancouver overtaken by film crews, where costumed aliens wander aimlessly between craft services and the set, Everything's Gone Green comically illustrates how hard it is to know what's real in a world filled with fakery and hidden agendas. Oddly touching and permeated with a sense of fun, this debut original screenplay from iconic author Douglas Coupland affectionately asks not what, but who you want to be when you grow up.

Ryan (Paulo Costanzo) believes in small, manageable dreams. Dumped by his yuppie girlfriend, he gets a dispiriting job with a lottery magazine, photographing winners and writing their stories. In a Mandarin language class he's taking for work, he meets the lovely Ming (Steph Song) and is immediately smitten. However, Ming has a slick boyfriend, Bryce (JR Bourne), who designs golf courses for private clubs whose members never show up.

The weirdly abandoned courses are a small piece in a large and dubious puzzle and, spotting an angle, Bryce tries to involve Ryan. As he watches friends and family achieve greater materialistic fulfillment, Ryan wonders why he shouldn't play the game, trade in two wheels for four and maybe, finally, get the girl. When Ming and Bryce break up, all Ryan needs to do is convince her he's different from Bryce - but suddenly that's harder than he ever expected.

Director Paul Fox and his note-perfect cast achieve a lighthearted tone delicately poised between comic exaggeration and recognizable reality. Costanzo is effortlessly charming as Ryan, and the supporting players are clearly having a blast. Coupland's influence can be felt throughout, as the insouciant visual world is often reminiscent of his own art.

Everything's Gone Green good-naturedly reminds us that the line between getting by and becoming corrupt is sometimes very thin, and that the most convincing lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

I’ve been a Coupland fan ever since Spooner introduced him to me back in university. I guess the thing that attracts me to Coupland’s writing is his understanding of the current times (or the zeitgeist for you romantics). He takes an individual or a group of individuals that represent a generation and he leads them from the dazed and confused to some grandeur revelation. And the characters all seem so hopeless and insignificant initially. Sort of how most of us feel as we transition from one phase of our lives to the next. It’s something I think all of us can relate to. And somehow through a series of unsuspecting events, they find their way and become aware of their purpose in life. I’d like to think that I’m one of these Coupland’s characters somewhere in the middle of the book, still searching for my reason for being -- walking around filled with self-doubt; engaging in clever dialogue and insightful conversations with the other characters in my life and waiting for that series of circumstances that will guide me to the end of this book.