Filthy pleasure

You Might as Well Live is a gleefully
perverse Canadian comedy

DARK BUT UNDAUNTED: Joshua Peace

by MALCOLM FRASER

The feature debut from Toronto director Simon Ennis is a strange mix of the silly and the perverse. You Might as Well Live stars Ennis’s co-writer Joshua Peace as Robert Mutt, a small-time outcast who gets institutionalized after a series of unsuccessful suicide attempts. When he’s released back into the community, his feelings of alienation become more understandable, as he’s the target of frequent humiliations, attacks and general hatred. Undaunted, he pursues a series of ill-advised schemes trying to become, as advised by his kindly loony-bin guard (The Wire’s Clark Johnson), “a real somebody.”

Peace has the good fortune of being assisted by a strong supporting cast. B-movie mainstay Michael Madsen appears as a burnt-out minor-league baseball player who Mutt idolizes, Dov Tiefenbach and Kristen Hager are sympathetic as Mutt’s only friends, criminally underrated Canadian character actor Stephen McHattie (Pontypool) brings his usual intensity as a villainous neighbour, and Montreal’s own Liane Balaban leaves us wanting more in a small role—the usually glamorous actress is uglied up and grotesquely funny as a borderline psychopath with a crush on our hero. And Hamilton, Ontario, standing in for the fictional town of Riverside, is part of the cast in its own right, its smokestack-ridden landscape adding atmosphere as it has in recent movies from Real Time to Olivier Assayas’s Clean.

Ennis and Peace’s sense of humour falls somewhere between the dry irony of John Paizs and the balls-to-the-wall shock value of John Waters. With copious full frontal male nudity, not one but two characters in vegetative states, and plenty of gags centred around violence and sexual perversion, the vibe is fairly dark. On the other hand, the absurdly naïve and wholesome protagonist—the hapless Mutt has never touched a drink or seen a naked woman, and does things like take IOUs in lieu of payment while working as a drug mule—gives the film an unexpectedly, strangely sweet undertone, as if Paul Reubens had combined his innocent Pee-Wee character with his porn-loving dark side.

While You Might as Well Live is decidedly not for everyone, you can definitely see it becoming a cult favourite, its gleeful perversity making it the perfect pick for a raucous late-night rental among friends.

YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE
OPENS THIS FRIDAY, SEPT. 25