Full disclosure: I owe my career to dead trees -- and not just because nearly every word I've written in 30 years has been printed on them.
Lucrative mill jobs in my Northern Ontario teens financed a journalism degree, loan-free.
Some high school friends went on to become forest fire fighters.
Others landed jobs along every link of what director Mark Leiren-Young cannily calls "the Green Chain" -- cutting, debarking, waferizing, pulping, etc.
So I can say that The Green Chain, Leiren-Young's windy polemic about the push-and-pull between sanctimonious eco-activists and the world-weary denizens of a fictitious Western mountain logging town, is well-informed.
He does, indeed, see the forest for the trees.
What he doesn't have a handle on is how to make a movie.
A series of soliloquies from talking heads (all of whom begin with the words "I love trees"), with trees and logging equipment as backdrops, The Green Chain feels like an overwritten fringe festival play, performed outdoors, with a single camera recording it for posterity.
More egregiously, The Green Chain employs the hackneyed documentary-within-the-movie approach, a conceit so overused there should be a moratorium.
We're never told who's conducting these interviews -- if you can call them that, no questions are ever asked.
The camera simply starts recording, say, a logger (Scott McNeil, handsome, well-spoken, seemingly right out of an Irish Spring commercial) and he proceeds to spill his guts, his boyhood dreams, his friends' traumas, as if we'd caught him after successful gestalt therapy.
C'mon, these are Canadians. You'd have to push and probe before they'd even tell you their name, let alone share their feelings with a stranger.
Before we're done, we've experienced reams of similar catharses, delivered in nothing that could ever be confused with how people actually talk (the one exception being August Schellenberg as a native working for a logging company -- a real pro, his speech is measured and evocative, allowing the script to breathe for the only few moments in the film).
There's an actress (Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer), a celebrity in town to endorse the anti-logging protests, caught in her motel room complaining about the primitive conditions, her own misgivings about being ignorant of the issues and about having to even be there at all.
In real life, no Hollywood actress would ever let her guard down in front of a camera like that.
Which again leads us to ask, who are these people recording these gut-spilling sessions that they have everybody's complete confidence?
And on it goes.
A fire-fighter (Tahmoh Penikett) tells his story. An older woman protester (Babs Chula) is interviewed behind bars, playing the role of cute, incarcerated eco-granny.
An obnoxious tree-sitter (Brendan Fletcher) gives his dude-manifesto 100 feet up a tree.
Bringing it on home is a waitress (Jillian Fargey) whose testimony manages to touch, Rashomon-like, on the previous six speeches, hitting the viewer over the head with moral relativism -- although Leiran-Young shows his hand from the beginning by making the townies more sympathetic than the self-righteous interlopers.
Somewhere, buried in the morass of words that is The Green Chain, there is a three-act structure and some interesting character arcs -- useful stuff if they ever decide to make a real movie out of this movie.
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