As the 2010 Olympics rapidly approaches and all levels of government continue to neglect Vancouver’s unique problems, this city’s cascading conflicts are capturing the attention and imaginations of local filmmakers.

Ross Weber’s Mount Pleasant is one of those rare local films that combines a compelling, nuanced Vancouver-centric plotline with a sincere, unheavy-handed investigation into this city’s most intractable social ills.

The movie centers around three couples seeking the good life in Canada’s most livable city. The main couple, played by veteran Canadian actors Benjamin Ratner and Camille Sullivan, desperately seeks to build a quaint domestic life for themselves in a rapidly gentrifying Mount Pleasant. But, unfortunately, their Mount Pleasantville domestic bliss is disrupted when their young daughter pricks herself on a needle left in their yard by one of the remaining neighbourhood junkies that decent middle-class folks like themselves are still in the delicate process of squeezing out.

The John

This heightens the husband’s vigilance against the inter-connected homeless, hooker, and junky hordes impinging on his white-picket-fence existence. And when he discovers a middle-aged man parked with an underage hooker in the back lane just behind his yard, he takes down the man’s license plate and tracks him down. A few days later, a letter describing the man’s degenerate pedophiliac behaviour arrives at his opulent Shaughnessy house, and his stern yuppy wife’s kitschy world is quickly turned on its sterile, insular head.

The prostitute (Toronto’s sultry Katie Boland), it turns out, is a hooker with a heart of gold who is supporting her and her boyfriend/pimp’s heroine habits. But when she finally gets fed up with life on the skids and hatches a naïve scheme to clean up, get together some cash, and move them both to an Edenic Thai island, her manipulative boyfriend blows all the money on drugs, leaving her pathetically high and dry.

What’s so spellbinding about this distinctly Vancouverian story is that each of the characters is seeking their own unique, exclusive version of paradise (be it in the form of impenetrable domestic bliss, the body of a nubile young girl, a Thai island escape, or a heroine-induced halcyon haze) but, somehow or other, hellish otherness always intrudes on the scene to burst their respective bubbles.

Like Weber and Ratner’s last major collaborative effort, Last Wedding, Mount Pleasant is a complex film that focuses on three couples whose lives intersect in interesting, unexpected, and anticlimactic ways. But unlike Last Wedding, which was a highly successful upper-middle-class existential comedy with extremely intelligent dialogue, Mount Pleasant is deeply flawed. While Weber’s subtle interlacing of powerful themes and leitmotifs is reminiscent of innovative HBO fair like Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, and Oz, the film’s dialogue and depiction of Vancouver’s seedy underbelly are more on par with a caricatureish movie-of-the-week.

Though almost all of the actors do an excellent job with the lines they are given, the dialogue is platitudinous and unadventurous, and it insufficiently fleshes out the nuances of the characters’ situations. The junky lovers, with their unblemished faces and $300 outfits, look more like the funkiest Main Street fashionista hipsters shmoozing and sipping on lattes outside of Soma than degenerate street hoods who are supposedly plumbing the depths of depravity. From a Hollywood North standpoint, the reason for this divergence from reality is obvious: sex sells much better than grotesque reality. But Canada’s most livable city badly needs an honest investigation into the markedly unsexy tensions that are pulling it apart.

Five Ring Circus

Those who are genuinely concerned about Vancouver’s plummeting status as Canada’s most livable city should check out Conrad Schmidt’s Five Ring Circus, a thoughtful documentary intended to expose Vancouver’s much-vaunted day in the sun as a significant epicentre of these seismic tensions. In contradistinction to the shiny, happy PR disseminated by our government, in collusion with construction, real estate, and hospitality interests, the 2010 Olympics is already a colossal disaster, and Schmidt does a brilliant job of probing many of the most concerning contours and fault lines.

Watch just ten minutes of the film and you will be both engulfed with nausea and driven to action. At a time when our social services and environmental standards are crashing against the rocks, the environmental devastation, social upheaval, and fiscal irresponsibility that all levels of government are unleashing on Greater Vancouver threaten to tear this already-crippled city apart at the seams. Five Ring Circus does a laudable job of cutting right through the manipulative cheerleading to show how giant interests are arrogating Vancouver for their own cynical purposes.

Five Ring Circus will be playing at the newly-refurbished Rio Theatre at Broadway and Commercial from March 2 to 8. Go to www.thefiveringcircus.com for details. Get your tickets early. It will sell out quickly. danadleman@gmail.com