Three years after Al Gore lectured his way to the Oscar podium with An Inconvenient Truth, it would appear that 2009 is the true year of environment documentaries. A good movie needs to tell a compelling story, not just a slideshow. Post-Gore, savvy non-fictional meditations on the state of world’s health must involve not only planetary needs but the dramatically involving actions of certain individuals on its behalf.
Directed by Robert Stone
At the Quad Cinemas
Runtime: 102 min.
Three years after Al Gore lectured his way to the Oscar podium with An Inconvenient Truth, it would appear that 2009 is the true year of environment documentaries. A good movie needs to tell a compelling story, not just a slideshow. Post-Gore, savvy non-fictional meditations on the state of world’s health must involve not only planetary needs but the dramatically involving actions of certain individuals on its behalf.
In the past few months, Food Inc. has peeled away the corporate makeup of America’s food industry, and audiences turned out in droves. The Cove, which opened last week, made an impassioned plea to fight aimless dolphin slaughter in Japan, and continues to make even cynical viewers bow to the principles of activist intent. The coming weeks will find Joe Berliner’s Crude surveying Chevron’s ambivalence over its role in causing deadly pollution-related injuries in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, and author Colin Beavan’s saga as an environmental junkie in No Impact Man.
While those movies reflect the modern feasibility of green politics and global awareness, Robert Stone’s Earth Days shows us how we got here in the first place. By exploring the original seeds of the modern environmental movement in the 1950s and ‘60s—through its eruption in the following decade with the first Earth Day April 22, 1970—Stone reveals that there’s nothing inherently “new” about green politics except that they have fallen back into favor.
That Earth Days follows a simple routine in its construction does not detract from the beauty of its earnest design. Stone contrasts expressive images of nature with ugly visions of factory-produced waste, as the principle talking heads behind Earth Day recount their initial wake-up calls. Though publications such as The Population Bomb and Silent Spring married scientific reasoning with desperate calls to action, their needs undoubtedly benefited from euphorically motivated flower power support. Hippies may have been clueless, Earth Days argues, but they sure knew how to mobilize.
The movie lacks a dramatic climax and avoids situating the earlier environmental movement in the context of modern concerns, so it may lose interest from viewers unmoved by passions from 40 years ago. However, the indictment of Western ideals from that era could easily apply to contemporary times. “Americans want to believe in a future that’s expansive,” explains one talking head, hitting a timeless note.
Earth Days’ political dimension is superficial, but intriguing nonetheless. It’s the rare left-leaning doc to make Richard Nixon look like a good guy, if only in a roundabout way. His support of eco-friendly projects helped make the ‘60s and ‘70s into an extremely productive time for the movement, although the efforts were virtually shut down overnight when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. It was morning in America, and issues of long-term importance were put to bed.
Since the team behind Earth Day sneak around massively indifferent institutional forces, Stone situates them as if they emerged from an Ocean’s Eleven sequel: Subtitles identify them as “The Radical,” “The Politician,” “The Forecaster” and so on. These nicknames equate activism with an advanced form of role-playing, which turns the cause itself into Stone’s own personal casting director. The survivors tell their stories, and the camera does the rest. No PowerPoint necessary.
