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PLOT: A teenage Vancouver drug dealer uses a derelict's secret time machine to go further and further back in time, seeking to alter the events that led up to his girlfriend's overdose.
There comes a time in every screenwriter's life when he tries to wrap his mind around time travel and paradoxes and what-ifs -- no matter how loudly people warn him to stay away from the light.
It's the central gimmick in the Canadian indie, Fetching Cody, one of the mildest and, with its rosy-cheeked junkies, most oddly saccharine takes on "street life" to be foisted on a Toronto Film Fest audience.
Opening today, David Ray's debut feature is a "comedy drama" about a magic time-travelling lounge chair and a teenage Vancouver drug dealer (Jay Baruchel), whose junkie girlfriend (Sarah Lind) is on the verge of death from an overdose. Are we laughing yet?
Art, the dealer-in-love, arrives home one evening for dinner with Cody, only to find her comatose on the floor. As she clings to life in hospital, Art seeks solace at the flat of one of his streetfriends, a raggedy old junk collector named Harvey (the colourful wheelchair-bound character actor best known for his role in the series Wiseguy).
In what initially sounds like just another rambling diatribe, Harvey goes on about the time-travel capabilities of a ratty La-Z-Boy he's acquired, inspiring a desperate Art to go back in time to get to the bottom of the drug habit that's killing the girl he loves.
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You're entitled to observe that drugs are what brought Art and Cody together in the first place, so removing that element from her life will -- ipso fatso -- almost certainly remove her from his life. It's certainly not something that occurs to Art as he makes one unsuccessful timetrip after another -- finally tracking down the singular trauma in her past that left her emotionally vulnerable enough to say yes to drugs.
Hey, maybe Tom Cruise is right -- who needs psychiatrists when we've got pseudo science and deus ex machina to get to the root of our problems?
Fetching Cody, with its squeaky-clean leads and tidy Vancouver streets generally comes off like an ABC After School Special with a lukewarm Twilight Zone ending.
The only sequence where it actually transcends primetime comes when Art intrudes on a suicide that is key to Cody's wounded psyche. There, he seems to get stuck in a feedback loop, getting blood and brains splattered on himself repeatedly as events play out unabated.
It's mordant humour that finally hits the mark (and accounts for the film's otherwise undeserved 18A rating), and it suggests what Ray may originally have been after with this film.
BOTTOM LINE: Half-baked where it could be raw, this recent T.O. film fest entry evokes ABC's After School Specials and, with its unsurprising "twist" ending, The Twilight Zone.
(This film is rated 18-A)