Radiant City
July 2008 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

This Canadian semi-documentary explores what attracts us to and then defeats us in suburban living. It centers on a family of four newly escaped from the congestion, noise and crime of the big city. They are living in a conventional tract house in a half-built, not-very-green development called Evergreen. The teenage son and his little sister show us around. First, he climbs the cell-phone tower and gives us a bird’s-eye view. In the far distance he points out their shopping mall, his school, his friend’s house, all unreachable on foot. Back on the ground, we follow all of them home as they thread their way past piles of earth and partial foundations, down wide driveways stretching like tongues to the empty, curving streets. The sardonic son introduces us to his neighborhood, standing in front of his treeless house, pointing to each of the identical houses on his street, explaining that he knows no one in them.

Their father, though, has been trying to meet the neighbors by joining a community theater. We find him in rehearsal for, of all things, a satire on suburban living. The mother in this family is offended by her husband’s participation: It was she who insisted on the move to Evergreen. The husband now commutes two hours a day for work. Her daughter’s best friend lives on the other side of the six-lane freeway. Her son, with no access to public transportation, has left his old friends behind for good. Family life centers around a complicated, color-coded calendar that keeps track of the parents’ duties as the kids’ chauffeurs. "Don’t do gymnastics," the father advises. "The miles on the car are phenomenal." The mother is defensive. "They put it on me."

Every aspect of suburban life is demonstrated through this family and sporadically commented upon by specialists from every relevant field: geography, sociology, urbanism, architecture, psychology. The film is crammed full of their memorable comments and stats: "Cities were originally people coming together. Suburbs are people fleeing each other." "Every year the average North American spends 55 eight-hour work days driving." "A suburban city is intolerant. It breeds solitary spaces." "Suburbia disaggregates the places of daily life so you have to drive from one to another." "The shopping mall is the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." "Traffic injuries and deaths are three times more common in the suburbs than in the inner cities." "Suburban sprawl uses 2-4 times as much land as medium density cities."

It’s not all negative. Lots of interesting, innovative ideas are offered for redeeming the suburb, such as diversifying the uses of the shopping mall and retrofitting the housing paradigm (adding homes for living arrangements other than the nuclear family). Just presenting this stressed, isolated, lonely family as honestly as the documentary does is instructive.

However, we find out at the end that the family are really nonprofessional actors. It was too difficult to find a real family that would be completely representative of all the issues the filmmakers wanted to address. All of them are suburbanites themselves and completely convincing in their roles.

One critic observes that suburban living has "a lot of momentum," that it’s an "intractable paradigm." But maybe we North Americans are on the cusp of change after all; the decline in our economy and the crisis in energy may cause reassessment. We can only hope. This movie does a fine job at pointing the way.

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