Joshua Peace is the suicidal Mutt, who ends up in, and then out of, a mental hospital. We're confused, too.

If Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys had a suicidal brother, he would be Robert Mutt (Joshua Peace), the protagonist of the arch and pointedly tasteless Canadian comedy You Might As Well Live.

The goggle-glass-wearing Mutt inhabits a strange universe, a generation of genetic drift from that of John Waters. Said universe is clearly Hamilton, but peopled by freak-show characters who follow no known rules of normal behaviour.

As such, You Might As Well Live is very much like Clinton Manitoba (Michael Madsen), the minor-league baseball legend who appears in fantasy sequences to give Mutt life advice. ie., it lurches about clumsily scratching its crotch, swings desperately for the fences for jokes and strikes out prodigiously. But it connects often enough to make you laugh, sometimes against your will, out of sheer shock and disbelief.

It says it all that director/co-writer Simon Ennis is not content to have one drooling, comatose central character in the movie. He has two -- and wouldn't it be funny if either of the actresses in question, Nicole Arbour, who plays Mutt's dreamgirl and Diane Gordon, who plays his mom, got nominated for a Genie?

The movie opens to probably its funniest scene (not really a good thing in terms of pacing), Mutt's ridiculously ill-planned first suicide attempt. When we meet next he's been three years in a mental institution where he feels at home for the first time in his life. But when he beats the new doctor at air hockey, he is declared "sane" out of spite and released to the insane asylum at large.

At home he finds that his neighbour (the ubiquitous Stephen McHattie) has framed him as a child pornographer to distract the neighbourhood from his own stash of kiddie porn, and Mutt finds himself chased naked by irate locals. Inside, his inert mother is in the "care" of his sleazy Uncle Casper (Boyd Banks) and Mutt's bimbo wannabe pop star singer sister (Kristin Fairlie).

The only people in his corner (and the only apparently sane people in the movie) are his best friend Hershey (Dov Tiefenbach) and Hershey's hot girlfriend Cookie (Kristen Hager).

Still, Mutt refuses to be a charity case, and emboldened by a vision in which his hero tells him he must acquire "a girl, money and a championship ring" to be somebody, he sets out on an improbable quest.

When he hears Jewish kids talking about the money they got at their bar mitzvah, he studies the Torah.

He also becomes a messenger boy for a drug dealer/organ trafficker and loses his stash at an orgy hosted by the town weatherman (Dan Lett), where a human liver ends up getting the Hannibal Lecter treatment, minus the fava beans.

In search of love, he meets a crazy girl with a "thing" for explosives (Liane Balaban) and a transsexual named Dixie (Greg Bryk).

There's no real traditional throughline to any of it, save for the deranged "happy ending."

The entire experience of You Might As Well Live is like one of those "Dark Comedy" nights at a sketch club, written on the fly by the most demented people in the room.
More Movie Reviews