**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring David Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson
screenplay by Norm Hiscock & David Foley & Bruce McCulloch & Kevin McDonald & Mark McKinney & Scott Thompson
directed by Kelly Makin
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The mad Scotsman John Grierson, documentary king and architect of Canada's National Film Board, often made the naïve assertion that those who wanted to make Canadian fiction films should go to Hollywood and make them there. He would have been pleased to learn that in 1996, the Kids in the Hall did just that: left without any pop-film infrastructure on their home turf, they made a bid for Yankee stardom with Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, shooting a Hollywood film that's Canadian to the core--for good and for ill.
The good news is that the film indulges in the sketch comedy pleasures at which Canada has always excelled, displaying in its cruel satire and bizarre non-sequiturs the manic benefits of our bent national sensibility. Alas, its insistence that suffering is character-building and that no-strings-attached happiness is somehow suspicious is Canadian in all the wrong ways, the sort of thing that would make fusty old John smile in his grave and tosses a wet blanket over a potential laugh riot.
It's too bad: the Kids have a honey of a concept in their attack on the Prozac Nation sweetened by shots at a number of peripheral targets; it constantly hints at the better film that might have been. At the centre of Brain Candy is Dr. Chris Cooper (Kevin McDonald), a chemist working on the depression drug Gleemonex: Fearing for his place in a downsizing company, he declares his half-tested Gleemonex ready for production, setting into motion a massive pharmaceutical disaster. As the drug screams up the sales charts ("We beat penicillin!"), the greedy CEO (Mark McKinney, in a hilarious lampoon of Lorne Michaels) applies for over-the-counter status to rake in even more cash--despite the fact that patients are lapsing into comas as a side effect. As Dr. Cooper frantically tries to alert the apathetic press to the dangers of the drug, the movie gears up for a massive dressing-down of an ethos that chemically masks pain instead of finding the source to relieve it.
But it doesn't happen. For one thing, the Kids don't quite connect the events of the outside world to those inside the company: some chilling downsizing imagery involving Andy Jones and monkeys is passed over without comment, and the saga of a closeted gay family man (Scott Thompson) registers chiefly as laboured cheap shots. For another, they attack the people one would expect them to champion: the drug's victims of Gleemonex. Instead of sympathizing with their plight, they mock the pathetic happy memories the drug uses to please them, as with the hapless Mrs. Hurdicure (Thompson again), who remembers a five-minute visit from a neglectful son and for her trouble goes completely comatose. One wonders what the point of this satire actually is--Brain Candy seems not to want to lift us up to a more satisfying high, but to accept the misery of life as insurmountable. As McKinney's familiar bitter cabbie sings at the film's beginning: "Life is shit. Life is short. And then it's OVER!"
Ultimately, the Kids use their gags against the audience, constantly delivering small punchlines with big set-ups and pouring derision on the small and alienated nature of everyone's fantasies--and wind up closer to Atom Egoyan's overrated "cinema of disappointment" (to use Andy Medhurst's phrase) than one might expect. Egoyan specializes in patronizing a collection of characters with alienated delusions, at once pointing out the undesirability of their fantasies while condemning them to the suffering that those delusions are designed to minimize. He denies catharsis for both characters and audience, and casts aspersions on any attempt to find solace in anything. So too with Brain Candy: its approach is not that we're supposed to throw away an illusory happiness for a better one, but that we're supposed to reject happiness for noble suffering. It, like the average Egoyan film, is an attack on the audience, not only in its finger-wagging approach to the subject matter but also in its determination to short-circuit the materials of comedy--and thus audience pleasure itself.
People deserve better than this shabby pseudo-intellectual abuse. As a person who has suffered from chronic depression (and employed brain candy in order to fight it), I can assure the Kids that my suffering did not in any sense make me a better person. It made me angry and bitter, lonely and fearful, hostile and antisocial, completely unable to face the things and people who could have brought me happiness. I agree that these drugs are probably being abused somewhere, somehow, by someone--drugs usually are. But then, so are satirical barbs when nobody cares if they hit the right targets. In the end, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy is interested in striking an austere pose and telling us to take our misery like the good British subjects we are rather than releasing us from bondage. John Grierson would be proud; I am not so sure he ought to be.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Paramount's DVD release of Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy misses an opportunity to set the record straight on the picture's tumultuous production or probe its live-grenade subject matter. In fact, the disc offers no extras whatsoever, not even a trailer. What you do get is the film in an average-looking 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer with an average-sounding Dolby Digital 5.1 mix; only scenes like the heavy metal concerts put the surrounds to use, though dialogue is clear as a bell.
88 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16x9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; English subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Paramount
