The credits list 4 separate Canadian government agencies with helping bring this motion picture to the screen. I know Canada has national health care, less crime and spends only slightly more on its national military than the city of Detroit spends on its SWAT unit, but there must have been a better use of taxpayer dollars than this boring nonsense. Installing free stripper poles in ever Canuck's bedroom? Doubling the size of the nation's emergency back bacon reserve? Increasing the minimum wage of Canadian actors so they don't all flee the Great White North for exciting careers as waiters and valets in LA and New York City? Anything would have been better than wasting everyone's time with Year of the Carnivore.
Sammy (Cristin Milioti) is a quirky, indy flick heroine. It's appropriate to describe her that way because she certainly isn't a real person or even a close facsimile thereof. She's an undercover spy for a grocery store who disguises herself to catch shoplifters, as though that job exists. She has a limp, except when the film comes to a point where she jumps and dances all over her apartment. At that point her impairment completely disappears. Sammy also has a crush on a street musician named Eugene (Mark Rendall), though it's not like there's anyone else in the movie to whom she could possibly be attracted.
Here's the plot. Sammy is so physically self-conscious she can't stand for Eugene to look at her naked body and she's so emotionally walled off she bursts into ticklish laughter anytime he tries to touch her. This rightly frustrates Eugene and he storms off in a huff, spouting off a virtual word salad which Eugene, Sammy and the audience are somehow supposed to take as a challenge for Sammy to go out and get really good at sex by boinking as many people as possible. Like an episode of Sports Night written by Aaron Sorkin, Sammy decides to go for it and the rest of the film is filled up with her varyingly pathetic attempts at intercourse before Year of the Carnivore slumps to a happy ending.
This thing couldn't be more artificially put together if the cast was constructed of Legos and Lincoln Logs and then stop motion animated. Sammy doesn't seem like a human being. Neither does Eugene, Sammy's hyperprotective mom (Shelia McCarthy), her sadsack dad (Kevin McDonald) or the screwed up neighbors across the way (Emily Holmes and Patrick Gilmore) with which Sammy has an inexplicable threesome. Sammy's grocery store boss (Will Sasso) doesn't seem like a real person, but that's okay because he does interesting things like beat the crap out of shoplifters and tries to spare the life of a rat caught in a snare. Sammy's co-worker (Ali Liebert) does seem like a living, breathing, genuine individual with motivations and an agenda that are both believable and relatable. So she, of course, is reduced to nothing more than Sammy's wise sounding board.
Let me give you some other example of the fakery that pervades this story. Sammy can't bear to let Eugene look at her, but she then has no problem at all dropping her pants in a public place and letting a stranger try and mount her from behind. She's so self-conscious about intimacy that she laughs every time she's touched, but then she goes to town on herself with another woman's vibrator while lying in between the fully awake twin infants she's babysitting. Eugene is introduced to the audience playing what appears to be a ukulele and singing Russian folk songs on the sidewalk near Sammy's store, but he quickly becomes the lead guitarist of a rock band who skyrockets to local club stardom. I'm not saying that rock guitarists can't like other music, but I doubt that Slash ever spent his off hours from Guns 'N Roses as a street musician doing Joan Baez covers.
Instead of concentrating on entertaining or engaging her viewers, writer/director Sook-Yin Lee plays out a tangle of off beat hokum. If Year of the Carnivore were consistently funny or at least tried to be, it wouldn't matter so much. Too much of this movie, though, is mundane. That can work with realism. It reeks when paired with mannered, pretentious pseudo-realism.
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