Monkey Warfare

Dan (Don McKellar) and Linda (Tracy Wright) are a couple in their early 40s who spend days tooling around the back alleys of Toronto's west end on old bicycles. They're professional scavengers of long standing — you can tell this by how comfortably indifferent they are to each other — and on a good day they find a lot of stuff in this rapidly gentrifying, garage-sale-crazy 'hood. Even if the stuff itself isn't valuable, it can often be made to appear so to naïvely overspending yuppie collectors trolling for treasures on the Internet. As for profits, there's no worthier investment than a fresh bag of weed. Dan and Linda are erstwhile activists but as you might guess, they've kind of packed it in.

Reg Harkema's funny, smart and slyly provocative second feature film, which borrows an agit-prop pop-art lick or two from Jean-Luc Godard but is closer in spirit to the comedy of marginalized despair practised by Mike Leigh, is a tart but sympathetic study of the tapped-out values of a featherless left wing. Dan and Linda once had ideals, and they are forced to re-confront them when their quest for a new source of bud introduces them to Susan (Nadia Litz), a pert young, politically curious dealer who finds Dan's distant militant past — most evident in his dusty record collection and scraggly Manchu whiskers — more than merely amusing. (Not that he's entirely disinterested, either.)

Set not only in downtown Toronto but in the rapidly eroding, loft-nutty former bohemia of the west end, the movie works by expressing themes of political fatigue, sexual lassitude and general middle-aged silliness in a highly personalized way: everybody — including the callow Susan — comes to this movie with a past, and it will eventually bear down with a force that creates some tentative new possibilities for the present.

As the older couple forced to face their hard-won cynicism and apathy, McKellar and Wright are convincingly worn in and worn out. They share too much to live comfortably apart, but they know too much to live happily together. This is why they're so vulnerable to an intervening, idealistic young rampart-stormer, who is at once a reminder of what they were and a warning of what drove them to become what they are.

Low-budget filmmaking at its precision-tooled best, Monkey Warfare thinks globally by acting (or acting up, really) locally.

Geoff Pevere's Bet for the TO Film Fest 2006 (Toronto Star)