Reborn in the opening scene by tearing his way out of a black garbage bag after being tossed in the trash from a prison van, Tommy irrevocably changes his life through a chance encounter in a Dollarama, the house of poverty. Helping an old woman — appropriately named Mrs. Whynot — get home with her purchases. Once inside, Tommy takes on the role of her surrogate son, Donnie, and moves into her house, a dilapidated/hoarder Dartmouth rowhome, with an eccentric number of characters, and lots of detritus on the front lawn.
Standing in the way of the demolition of the complex, or perhaps renovating it towards future gentrification, is aggro-arsehole, drug dealer, and would-be kingpin LL Plísek. He has a bumper sticker on his contractor truck with a hurt cyclist, a tally, and the words “Hit Count”, and is played by Stephen Dorff at his most slime-ball and angry. LL is the landlord of the current slum, and uncle to the girl who Tommy falls in love with after being squirted in the face with bleach.
The super-soaker operator is played by young Woodrow Graves, somewhat grown up since his leading roll as the toddler star of The Crescent, and frequent collaborator with Seth A. Smith (who is also his dad). After the surreal and muddy odyssey of Lowlife, toddler-centric creature feature The Crescent, and medical nightmare fuel of Tin Can, one might think that a film on community and the current housing crisis in Canada would be a major left turn for Smith.
One would be very, very wrong.
Permanent Damage, is not only very much a film of the East Coast auteur (and his collaborator screenwriter, Darcy Spindle), it could also be a literal or spiritual sequel to Lowlife with the salty coastal forest traded for the sodium vapour lamp-lit urban jungle. It just takes a bit of unconventional drug use and blue-collar construction work to get there. Chik White (the lead of Lowlife) has a sizeable role here as a drug addled, absolutely incomprehensible man in a wheelchair (requiring subtitles for most of his mumbly dialogue) who lives in the one of row home units, and laughs a lot more than he did in Smith’s first film.
With a grungy 1990s indie pop-punk sensibility, and a slow-moving hanging out movie that does eventually evolve into a slap stick crime caper from the era, Smith builds a cast of oddballs in a down‘omer homage to The Wizard of Oz, which is explicitly mentioned here. In this case, there is not “no place like home”, but the strong possibly, “no home at all.”
Tommy is given a job by LL to use a spray-foam gun that is both a metaphor for papering over the rot of poverty, but more importantly, it visually beautiful as it expands over the mold and wooden joists. For all the running around and plot resolution in the third act, it is the slow observation of beauty in decay, and outsider community of oddballs just chilling, that might be Permanent Damage’s secret pleasure.
I will not spoil the decidedly not-a-MacGuffin of the films caper plot, but at the Fantasia premiere of the film, they handed out tiny coffee flavoured beans, with instructions to eat the morsel at a very specific point of the film when it is revealed what exactly the drug they characters take, is.
Prolific Canadian character actor and icon, Stephen McHattie appears for one scene as an eccentric Tiger-King-esque exotic animal owner, who does business from a pink hot-tub while being "serviced" by a Furry, from underwater. He only pays in crypto. Yes, it is that kind of movie. It does, however, have its heart in the right place when it wants to take itself seriously. Long takes of a wrecking ball slowly pulling apart people’s homes, as the main character laments: “Everything I touch gets ruined,” cannot simply be stacked in the same column as some of the films more surreal black-light and neon shenanigans.
Both a wacky drama and a drug-fuelled heist film, Permanent Damage is, simultaneously, effervescently slight and deeply memorable. It is swell to see street trash get the opportunity for a second life.
Both a wacky drama and a drug-fuelled heist film, Permanent Damage is, simultaneously, effervescently slight and deeply memorable. It is swell to see street trash get the opportunity for a second life.