Cera has thrived in this kind of pairing, as the ready foil to an adjacent loudmouth — whether it’s Jonah Hill in Superbad; Jack Black in Year One; or Michael Cera in Youth in Revolt, in which he played a double role as a mild-mannered stammerer named Nick Twisp, and a swashbuckling ladies’ man improbably named François Dillinger. The pattern extends beyond Cera, too. At first glance, Seth Rogen could not be more different from him: one comes off as a go-with-the-flow stoner, while the other worries the flow might give him hives. Yet both are, in their way, classic sane men in insane worlds. In Knocked Up, Rogen is the laid-back buoy bobbing on a surrounding sea of anxiety. He’s a proven expert at the easygoing stalwart amid chaos (and less adept, it seems, at playing unhinged, as in the oddly sadistic and unsuccessful mall cop comedy Observe and Report).
Similarly, even as Ellen Page mouthed Diablo Cody’s go-go hipster patois as Juno, she was in essence an oasis of sanity in a junkyard of malfunctioning misfits. She dealt with unexpected pregnancy, cuckoo parents, a nutty gal pal, and Jason Bateman’s creepy man-boy, and through it all she emerged as a teenybopper Rod Serling, slyly narrating this Twilight Zone of idiocy.
Now, you might say: Sure, this is funny. It’s certainly popular. But is it intrinsically Canadian? Well, let’s see. The constant foil to a neighbouring loudmouth? The reasonable stalwart in a world gone mad? Is any of this starting to sound familiar in, you know, geopolitical, metaphorical terms?
If Canada and the United States performed as a comedy duo, there’s no doubt which role we’d play. We’re the Aykroyd to their Belushi, the Michael to America’s Clark. In normal times, this would sound like a put-down. But right now, thanks to Cera and his Canadian cohort, the sane man is having a moment. The foil has stepped to centre stage to become the star.
And then there’s Scott Pilgrim. You want a sane man in an insane world? How about a smart, bumbling, sweet, mixed-up, overqualified and underconfident kid who falls for a seductive American minx? Only then does he learn that to win her love he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends in armed combat. (One of whom — spoiler alert — turns out to be a girl.)
Pilgrim is more than the star; he’s a superhero. In the comic, a recurring battle cry (insofar as slackers have battle cries) is “C’mon, he’s Scott Pilgrim” — usually remarked to quell worry even as Pilgrim dispatches yet another sword-swinging miscreant. But Pilgrim is not the calm and affectless Steve McQueen type of yesteryear. He’s no American. Instead, he’s a hero for a post-Bush, post–Great Recession, post-blowhards-and-bravado world. He’s a Canadian hero, and he’s the role Michael Cera was born to inhabit: the ultimate Canadian sane man comedian will now embody the ultimate Canadian sane man comic book superhero.
Reportedly, when the comic was being adapted for the screen, Pilgrim’s Toronto fans feared that director Edgar Wright (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) would change the locale to an American city. Thankfully, he decided to anchor the story in Toronto, complete with streetcars, snowbanks, and a cameo by Honest Ed’s. (The comic features a memorably epic battle in the landmark discount store, in a chapter titled “The Stark Existential Horror of Honest Ed’s,” which will ring true to anyone who’s fought through zombie-like crowds for a 99-cent mop.) Smart move. This melding of actor, role, and location represents an unprecedented Canadian cultural triumph, our ascent to First World comedic status. We’re no longer exporting raw talent; we’re disseminating — and not particularly stealthily, either — a homegrown sensibility. We may now forever banish our shameful memories of knock-offs like Chilliwack and Puck. We have taken sanity and made it hilarious. The film may be titled Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but “conquers the world” is more like it.
