'Monkey Warfare' approaches laughs from the left
Having made the film-festival rounds for a few years, "Monkey Warfare" is only now washing ashore in movie theaters. It's very low budget, very unkempt, very Canadian, and leftists of a certain generation will probably find it very funny.
Written and directed by Reginald Harkema, the movie is slapdash in a fashion that works both for it and against it. We're introduced to Dan (Don McKellar) and Linda (Tracy Wright), aging Vancouver radicals who've traded in their fire-bombing past for lazier ways of fighting the Man: They spend their days dumpster-diving and raiding yard sales, selling their finds on
Even the couple's love life has run aground into 21st century entropy. Their rent-controlled house is a no-sex zone of junk and unsmoked buds. Into this stalemate walks Susan (Nadia Litz), a 20-something pot-dealing hottie who talks the New Anarchy and gets Dan's libido and social conscience firing for the first time in years.
Lord knows where Harkema was during the 1960s, but he has the soundtrack down pat - the Fugs' "Kill for Peace," a Leonard Cohen song that Susan dismisses as "this hippie [expletive] you're playing." The director also has a jaded eye for the shortcomings of both the '60s generation and their modern heirs, radicals who value the symbolic act over real transformation. "How does wrecking SUVs change the world?" someone asks here, and the unspoken answer is that it doesn't - but it looks cool.
That's selling "Monkey Warfare" as a heavier movie than it is, when it's really a sardonic shaggy-dog farce about the failure of the Revolution to do much except affect the sales of berets and MC5 CD reissues. Harkema quotes old Godard movies with a kind of exhausted sigh, and he views the predations of the yuppie marketplace as obnoxious but inevitable. Maybe a Molotov cocktail will bring down housing prices, but not for long.
The film eventually - and unconvincingly - takes sides before running out of gas in the final scenes. As useless as Dan and Linda seem now, their idealism once meant something, whereas Susan's is a punk pose, the radicalism of kids who've grown tired of hanging out at the mall.
Still, both generations have their good intentions and their casualties. "Monkey Warfare" - the title comes from the late counterculture clown prince Abbie Hoffman - finds a tatty comic bliss in inertia. It says the more you try to change the world, the more the world rolls right over you and keeps moving on.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 