Nothing is ever clear cut.

Genre: Drama, Environmentalism, Faux Documentary
Director: Mark Leiren-Young
Role: Leila Cole
Cast: Tahmoh Penikett, Brendan Fletcher, Babs Chula, Jillian Fargey, Scott McNeil, August Schellenberg
Release Date: Canada, June 19 2009 (theatrical; limited)
MPAA Motion Picture Rating: This movie is not yet rated.

• Overview
• Memorable Leila Quotations
• Said of The Green Chain
• The Green Chain Movie Trivia
• Critical Reception
• The Green Chain Online

More The Green Chain images of Tricia in our The Green Chain Photo Gallery

The battle between loggers and environmentalists is defining, dividing and destroying communities in Canada and around the world. The Green Chain depicts the conflicts between the people on both sides of the battle who love trees and are willing to risk anything to protect their personal visions of the forest, and examines a community and a way of life through a series of inter-linking monologues inspired by the true tales and personalities that define today’s forests.

* * * *

Tricia Helfer portrays Leila Cole, a B-list movie star who arrives at the logging protest primarily to gain publicity and promote her own image.

[rehearsing a speech] “Okay, I’ll try it again. ‘I love trees, and the reason I’m here today is because we have a unique opportunity to save this precious ecosystem’… That doesn’t sound right. ‘E-cosystem’?… Make a note to check that, okay? Someone’s got to know, ‘eco’, ‘e-co’. Just to be sure. I don’t want to get it wrong. ‘E-cosystem’… [turning to guy behind the camera] You’re the environmental expert, ‘e-co’, ‘eco’?”
[Guy: "'E-co.'"]
“‘E-co.’ Thank you thank you thank you. ‘E-cosystem’… You know what? Maybe that’s the Canadian pronunciation. I don’t know, I know I’ve heard both. Just, we’d better check.”

[rehearsing a speech] “‘This isn’t about me’… I’m not gonna say that! Makes it sound like it’s all about me!… Who wrote that, my publicist? Did Joanne ask you to put that in? Just take it out.”

“I mean, think about it, none of these reporters really wants to be here. No one wants to be here. They all had to fly out or drive up. Maybe if I just start out with that, acknowledge it. Did you see this place?… This is the nicest room in town. The nicest room, and it’s in a motel. Can’t even remember the last time I was in a motel… The last time I was in a motel I was getting chased by a slasher. And I got to go back to my trailer when they yelled ‘cut’… Do you think they should yell ‘cut’ in a slasher film? I think in a slasher film, ‘cut’ should mean ‘roll’, not ‘stop’. Right?… This whole place looks like the set of a slasher film. Or a vampire movie. Maybe one of those plague things. Do you see this? The buildings are cheap, the cars are cheap. The stores… have you seen the stores? Half of them are closed. I mean, even in the ones that are open everyone looks depressed.”

“Here I am! My one weekend off in a month, in the only town left on the planet with no Starbucks. Who doesn’t have a Starbucks?”

“I’m here because the TV cameras will follow me. Like you did. And they’ll take my picture. Hopefully, they’ll take my picture standing in front of the blockade with the protestors, and if we’re lucky, really lucky, we’ll end up on Entertainment Tonight or in People magazine or Entertainment Weekly and they’ll do a story on the forest. And the kids, trying to save the forest and risking their lives. And they’ll talk about the ancient trees, and maybe that old lady, the one who got arrested? That’d be great.”

“They’ll just say that I lost it again. Great. Then my mom will call, because one of her friends will show her tabloid stories, or she’ll be watching the news, and I’ll have to explain that, ‘No, mom, I’m not buying this town. No, mom, I’m not running off with a mountain man.’ Well, maybe a camera man. [snickers] Yeah, you think it’s funny until it says you made me join a cult. Or, I met you in rehab. What’s the point of even making this speech if no one’s gonna listen?”

“I thought it’d be pretty. Have you seen the pictures? It’s beautiful in the pictures.”

“Hey, did you see the look on their face when I asked for a burger, no bun? Or when I asked for salad instead of fries? It was like she was mad at me for being there. It’s not like we didn’t pay. Everybody there, the way they looked at me was… Shit. You don’t think… Shit, shit! They’re probably loggers and they know why I’m here. Oh, I’m so stupid, that would totally make sense!… You don’t– You dont think she spit in my salad, do you? Ohh… I gave her almost 100 bucks for a tip, you don’t think she spit in my salad– OH YUCK, OH! I HATE that! That’s so mean. Oh, you could definitely do a slasher movie here, they already have the chainsaws!… [snickers] Come on, that was funny.”

“Look, I know it’s important. I do, that’s why I’m here, but if I say anything at all, if I say anything about trees, they’re just gonna make me sound… I wanna help. I do, that’s why I sent money. It wasn’t just the tax thing. I could send my money anywhere.”

“Can’t they just take pictures of me and talk to someone else?”

“We tried to option her story, you know? About how she went to jail to save the trees? It’s a great story, I’d love to do that part. We’d have to change it a little bit, so she’s not that old, you know, mid-20s and a single mom, so there’s jeopardy there. It’s like Erin Brockovich, but with trees. It’s a great story, powerful. That’s the kind of thing I wanna do.”

“I just feel like there’s no way to win. If I act like an expert, everybody knows I’m just acting. And if I admit that I’m just here because I care, because I wanna help, then it’s like, ‘Well, what do you know about trees?’ What do I have to know?”

“I’m not an expert, I just care.”

Select quotations regarding the film from Tricia Helfer and her co-workers: Coming soon/not available.

• Tahmoh Penikett and Tricia Helfer also co-star in the Battlestar Galactica series. They do not share a scene in The Green Chain, however.

• Although The Green Chain premiered at various Canadian and U.S. festivals in 2007, it did not receive a theatrical release until 2009. The film premiered in theaters in Toronto, Canada in June 2009.

Due to the very limited distribution of The Green Chain, professional reviews on the film are noticeably hard to find. From the available online material on the film, however, both critical and audience impressions of the film seem to have been mixed, The Green Chain garnering both acclaim and flak for its handling of the subject matter and documentary-type style.

• Rating > Internet Movie Database: 4.3/10 (50 user votes counted)
• Rating > MetaCritic: No rating (professional)
• Rating > Rotten Tomatoes: No rating (professional)

Extracts from professional reviews:

“A septet of documentary quasi-interviews and monologues, The Green Chain is a cross-cultural and intriguing look at the business, controversy, politics, and social doctrines surrounding the forestry business. I was expecting a bit more critical thought and analysis, however; considering that it took the film-crew a good year to put this movie together, you’d expect they would have tried to effect more change with it — given the climate of social awareness out there. Instead, the film didn’t capture the tension of the subject matter. The film-maker was largely absent from the film, resulting in a pastiche of views which, in their own ways, entirely missed the seriousness and complexity of the forestry “business” and the brainwash inherent in its persistence.”
- BeyondRobson.com

“Playwright Mark Leiren-Young’s debut feature is an attempt to parse the complexities of British Columbia’s logging industry, one didactic talking head at a time. Opening with imagery of industrial clear-cutting machines that suggests nothing so much as Imperial Land Walkers descending on Endor, The Green Chain shows its hand early, in an unbroken 15-minute shot wherein a lumberjack (Scott McNeil) waxes implausibly poetic about the upheaval of his profession and his dislike for eco-activism. [...] The quality of the acting is variable, but the writing is consistently flat. Leiren-Young is trying to give voice to a multiplicity of perspectives, but his efforts are self-defeating: instead of a comic cacophony, The Green Chain gives us an earnest monotone.”
- Adam Nayman, Eye Weekly

“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.”
- Jim Slotek, Sun Media

Awards & Nominations

The Green Chain has received a total of 2 awards and 1 award nomination.

Awards:
• Gavà International Environmental Film Festival El Prat de Llobregat Award (2008)
• Leo Award (2008) — Best Supporting Performance by a Female in a Feature Length Drama (Jillian Fargey)

Nominations:
• Writers Guild of Canada Award (2008) — Feature Film

Personal Thoughts

Sandra: Despite the interesting subject matter, The Green Chain did not impress. The whole faux documentary-thing and the monologues just felt contrived and didn’t really have any of the intelligent reflection on the issue at hand that I expected. The perspectives were simply too many and the premise too obscure, so much so that I was actually unable to finish the movie after Tricia’s segment. Ambitious but rubbish.

As Leila, Tricia Helfer is good, although her character is probably the least believable of the lot. Although she pulls off the entire 13-minute monologue with admirable conviction, the speech itself is mostly just a simpleminded celebrity’s vain ramblings about publicity and personal credibility, and the fact that she has to keep talking for more than 10 minutes virtually uninterruptedly just makes the entire scene feel staged and rehearsed instead of spontaneous and involving.

Below are some The Green Chain-related links that may be of interest to you.

• The Green Chain official site
• The Green Chain TFL-approved fanlisting
• The Green Chain TFL-approved Leila character fanlisting
• The Green Chain on IMDb.com
• The Green Chain on RottenTomatoes.com
• The Green Chain on Wikipedia.org

• Mark Leiren-Young on IMDb.com
• Mark Leiren-Young on Wikipedia.org

• Tahmoh Penikett on All About Tahmoh Penikett