The Martlet

Let’s go back in time.

It’s Christmas day in 1985.  The Coopers, a dysfunctional family in upstate New York, have adapted well to the ‘80s. Gord, the dad, is wearing a red-knit sweater with a herd of reindeer on it. Nancy, the mom, has enough poof in her hair to rival Marge Simpson. There is shag carpet everywhere.

Cooper’s Camera, which played last weekend at the Victoria Film Fest, is a mockumentary of what is recorded after the Cooper family finds a second-hand VHS camcorder under the tree.

Budget-conscious Nancy is upset. She was hoping for a romantic trip to Disneyworld in Orlando. Marcus, the eldest son, truly believes he is from another planet and doesn’t seem to notice.

But little Teddy, the youngest kid who spends the whole film in his pajamas, is intrigued.

He takes it upon himself to film the entire day on the new camcorder, documenting a family on the verge of disintegration.

Things start to get messy when uncle Tim, a smooth-talking travel agent, arrives. Dear uncle Tim slept with Nancy on her wedding night while her new husband, Gord, was passed out drunk in the bathtub. Nobody has seen him for 17 years.

When Tim arrives at the front door, Nancy changes into a sexy number, Gord hits the bottle and it’s all downhill from there.

Minus the setting, the film is as Canadian as it gets.  It’s directed by Toronto’s Warren P. Sonoda and stars Samantha Bee and Jason Jones, the Canadian correspondents from The Daily Show. And if you’re a duct tape connoisseur, you may recognize Gord, played by Peter Keleghan, as Ranger Gord from The Red Green show.

The film is definitely over the top. Little Teddy pays his 14-year-old cousin, Heather, to strip for him. Gord tells Marcus he was born a hermaphrodite.  The Coopers flee to the border after lighting a car on fire and killing one of the main characters.

At a question and answer session with Sonoda after the film, one audience member asked if the actors were drinking real alcohol while filming the movie.

“Suprisingly, they weren’t,” answered Sonoda.

But a Globe and Mail reviewer didn’t like the movie.

“There is no glory here,” he wrote. “Comedies should be unafraid and without sentiment. Still, an anti-family Christmas story that asks its audience to hold a smirk for 90 minutes is probably going too far.”

The audience at last weekend’s screening of Cooper’s Camera was doing much more than smirking — it was a room of belly-ache laughter and the occasional gasp of “Oh my god!”

Maybe Victorians were sympathetic to the film because they endured the Christmas insanity only a month ago. And even if Cooper’s Camera was a bit (or completely) over the top, it did hit on an unfortunate truth: a holiday-knit turtleneck can’t cover up one heck of a dysfunctional family.