R.J. Cutler's vibrant and mischievous documentary "The September Issue" is only partly a movie about fashion. At its heart, it's really a movie about work, about the ways individuals compete with, grate against and inspire one another in the workplace. The movie documents the creation of the largest and most anticipated issue of Vogue magazine's yearly cycle -- in this case, specifically, the September 2007 issue, the fattest in Vogue's history -- by tracking the frustrations, confrontations and backstage machinations of the players who put it together, from the fashion editors to the art director to the guy who mans the office's color copier. Presiding over this aesthetically attuned circus is editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who, as Candy Pratts Price, the executive fashion director of Vogue's online adjunct, Style.com, says in the movie, is not just the high priestess of the whole enterprise but the pope.
Wintour is considered the most formidable figure in the fashion world (she's the tiny titan guarding the gateway to the pages of the most influential fashion magazine in the world) and also has a reputation for being an arrogant, sometimes unreasonable boss (as detailed by Lauren Weisberger, one of Wintour's former assistants, in her gossipy novel "The Devil Wears Prada," which in turn inspired Meryl Streep's icy, campy performance in the movie version). "The September Issue" doesn't fully dispel either of those notions, though it does fill them in with additional shades of color. What really drives Cutler's picture is the dynamic between Wintour and her right-hand woman, creative director Grace Coddington, who has, for more than 20 years (she started at American Vogue at the same time Wintour did, in 1988), been the mastermind behind the magazine's most imaginative fashion spreads. Wintour may be the elusive minx who first captured Cutler's interest. But with Coddington as the other half of this highly mismatched tag team, Cutler has struck documentary gold. Coddington -- a former model and flame-haired Welsh giantess who pads around the Vogue office in billowy black trousers and sturdy flat sandals, a chic but earthbound contrast to Wintour in her tiny, fur-trimmed jackets and spiky heels -- is the not-so-secret star of "The September Issue." Radiating equal parts flamboyance and good common sense, Coddington needles Wintour in a way no one else on staff dares. Their working relationship is an uneasy chemistry of mutual regard and know-it-all stubbornness, a fascinating model -- not easily described, nor, alas, readily reproducible -- of the way creativity and friction can coexist in the workplace.
But first, the dirt. The fashion blogs have been buzzing for months in anticipation of Cutler's film; some of them have been doling out bonbon-like snippets, including footage of Wintour making a funny little frown -- she looks as if she's just gotten a whiff of rotten egg -- as the issue's cover girl, Sienna Miller, twirls around in a strange feathery dress that curls around her like a malevolent nautilus. Fashion people are fascinated by Wintour, and the bloggers' clips have been intended to foster a view of the film as gossipy and bitchy, an inside look at how nasty Wintour can be. But in the context of the movie, Wintour's disapproving frown means something else: She isn't cutting Miller down; it's simply that the dress some editor has put Miller in is just weird. It doesn't look good.
In "The September Issue," Wintour comes off as a demanding boss but also a forthright one. Late in the movie, Cutler asks her what she thinks are among her strongest qualities and she answers, "Decisiveness." Over the years, plenty of horror stories have attached themselves to Wintour like stubborn barnacles: Among her sins (chronicled by Weisberger and others) are failing to learn the names of her assistants and dropping her furs around the Vogue offices for her underlings to pick up. The fact that such abuses aren't shown in Cutler's film isn't evidence that they've never happened: Wintour is nothing if not a shrewd protector of her own image, so you can bet she'll be on her best behavior when the cameras are turned on.
But when you're talking about bosses, one person's decisiveness is another person's bitchiness -- and if you've ever worked for an indecisive boss, the clarity and directness of Wintour's approach probably won't seem villainous to you. In one scene she tries, mustering as much tact as she's capable of, to explain to one of her editors that all of her spreads look the same. She wants the editor to try to branch out, and she ends the discussion with a cold, clipped "Thanks" -- which could be read as "I don't really care about you as a human being" or as "well, that's done, let's move on," depending on your sensitivity as an employee. At least, though, she's expressed her desires as clearly as possible. And her tone makes it clear that she thinks this editor is capable of better, hardly a tone she'd take if she thought she were dealing with a hopeless case.
Cutler -- who produced Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's "The War Room," and whose directing credits include the 2000 television documentary series "American High" -- is an honest documentarian, which means that he knows he's not just turning on the camera and allowing the truth to reveal itself. "The September Issue" is revelatory, but it's also shaped, sometimes in subtle ways. The "drama" of a young editor being dressed down in Wintour's office isn't inherently dramatic; what makes it work is the way he expresses his frustration to Coddington in the hallway afterward. Coddington, who is in her late 60s, speaks to him sternly: "You have to be tougher," she tells him. "You have to demand . . . Don't be too nice -- even to me." Other sequences involve Wintour and Vogue's art director, Stephen Male, hovering over potential spreads, with Wintour seemingly rejecting a greater percentage of pictures than she praises, sometimes throwing out as much as $50,000 worth of work with the sweep of a hand. Later, we see Coddington -- whose job is to produce many of those spreads -- sitting quietly in her office, wondering aloud whether it's worth her while to care as much as she does.
"The September Issue" exists, ostensibly, to shed some light on the notoriously frosty Wintour as a human being, and Cutler pulls it off. In one sequence, he gets Wintour talking about her "private and inscrutable" father (who was an editor at the Evening Standard) and his "Edwardian" upbringing: "I'm not sure his mother ever spoke to him," Wintour says plainly, which seems to be a daughter's way of explaining a father's distant behavior in a humane and sympathetic way.
But -- and perhaps this is part of Wintour's design, maybe even an inadvertent design -- it's Coddington who emerges as the movie's most intriguing presence, the one you find yourself wanting to learn more about. Early in the picture, we see her kneeling at the feet of a model to fasten the strap of a shoe. She wisecracks that she's the only stylist who dresses the models herself (which, in the world of high fashion, is probably true). Coddington, who grew up on an island off the coast of Wales, talks about loving Vogue since she was a teenager (she had to special-order the magazine at a local shop), and about her career as a model from the late '50s to the mid '60s (her run was curtailed by an auto accident). Cutler's camera follows Coddington into her home, where she points out the modeling photographs of her younger self -- a striking, alert beauty -- that adorn her walls. She assesses these images affectionately but without vanity, as if she were musing on the fate of long-gone ancestors, people who lived long ago.
"The September Issue" shows Coddington as both a creative force and a problem solver. She speaks of the advice her long-ago mentor, the great photographer Norman Parkinson, once gave her: "Keep watching," he told her. Don't go to sleep when you're riding in a car. "Whatever you see out the window -- it can inspire you." And late in the movie, we see that resourcefulness put to use, brilliantly, to solve a last-minute crisis.
Coddington adds a conspiratorial frisson to the action of "The September Issue," cajoling Cutler's crew (whom she at first refused to cooperate with, relenting only grudgingly) into spilling information they've gotten from filming Wintour. And the movie captures several sandpapery confrontations between the two women, in which they stubbornly butt heads and miraculously reach some kind of consensus.
But if Coddington is the kind of tough cookie who can stand up to Wintour (and win), it's clear there's an essential kindness inside her, too. There are plenty of people who believe that models are not real human beings, but stupid, spoiled, vapid creatures who deserve nothing but our derision. Coddington, obviously, isn't one of them. In one scene, she oversees a shoot in which a seemingly 10-foot-tall but twiggishly thin model has been corseted and squeezed into a couture dress that probably costs more than your salary and mine combined. The girl peers into a pastry box that Coddington has brought to the shoot, thanking her for bringing treats. She then says, wistfully, that she shouldn't eat any, because then her corset won't fit.
Coddington unfussily tells her that it shouldn't make any difference, and if she wants some pie, she should have it. Later we see the model during a break, gingerly holding a large slice of the pastry to her couture-crimson mouth -- keeping a safe distance from that very costly confection of a dress -- and taking a good, healthy bite. If management consultants (perhaps the very ones poring over Vogue's books right now) were smart, which they usually aren't, they'd study "The September Issue" as a text on how to get the best work out of people by treating them with kindness and respect. And, as Coddington shows, a little pie doesn't hurt.
So here's the real question about capitalism, the one nobody really wants to face: Does it create gross inequality as an unfortunate byproduct of its energy and dynamism -- or is gross inequality itself, between rich and poor, between the industrialized North and the underdeveloped South, the principal product of capitalism over the last five centuries?
Philippe Diaz's powerful and upsetting documentary "The End of Poverty?," which weaves together a wide range of talking-head experts and a startling array of ordinary poor people and their advocates from around the globe, casts a strong vote for Option B. Unfortunately, that answer is virtually off-limits in public discussion these days, and is likely to make the film and its French-American director unpalatable to precisely the audiences who should see it and think about it.
It would be easy, and not entirely unfair, to classify Diaz's film as part of the ongoing effort among certain elements of the global left to rehabilitate Marxism, now that memories of the Soviet nightmare have faded. (In fact, Diaz is planning a film about Marx's "Capital," arguably still the most astute study of capitalism ever written.) But that label suggests a dogmatism that is totally absent from "The End of Poverty?" Diaz's interviewees include the Nobel-winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, along with such other leading academics as economist William Easterly and political scientists Susan George and Chalmers Johnson. Those people represent a wide range of views (Easterly might even be described as a libertarian conservative), and none of them is likely to start ranting about the abolition of private property or the inevitable triumph of socialism.
"The End of Poverty?" seeks to remind us that the global victory of capitalism over the last 30 years has only brought its flaws into sharper focus. We now live in a world where 20 percent of the population -- that's you and me, bub -- use 80 percent of its resources, where upward of 1 billion people live on $1 a day or less, where 16,000 children die daily from malnutrition and where the people of sub-Saharan Africa, the globe's poorest region, spend $25,000 every minute servicing their massive debt to the rich countries of the North. All those markers of extreme poverty have gotten dramatically worse since the '80s; despite rapid technological and agricultural progress in the developed world, the number of people suffering from chronic malnutrition has roughly doubled in the past 40 years.
Diaz doesn't spend much time addressing the responses of mainstream or neoliberal economists to these phenomena -- essentially: gee, that's too bad! But deregulation, innovation and privatization will fix it all eventually -- and his impressive film would be stronger if he had. Presumably his title is meant to challenge or rebut Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, the rock-star economist whose book "The End of Poverty" (with no question mark) argues that a program of massive international aid, mixed with marginal, incremental reforms in poor countries -- can curtail extreme poverty within 20 or 30 years.
It's become conventional to blame the culture and climate of poor countries and poor people, at least in part, for their own plight, as if corrupt dictatorships, ethnic warfare and raw-material economies were somehow intrinsic to Africa and Latin America. In depressing but largely convincing fashion, Diaz's film argues that all those things were the result of a lengthy historical process. Africa's dysfunctional and often anti-democratic regimes definitely aren't helping matters, for example, but they themselves -- along with the dire poverty they can't manage -- were produced by the European and North American powers' relationship to the global South, from 16th-century colonization right through 21st-century globalization.
What's most profound, and also most controversial, in this analysis is the question of how much this pattern of exploitation continues today. Between 1503 and 1660, the precious metals looted from the Americas by the Spanish crown increased the European silver reserves fourfold, funding a massive expansion of imperialism. Today, the World Bank estimates that the developing world spends $13 in debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants. Exactly how different are these scenarios? Is our affluent, consumer-democracy Western lifestyle only possible because we are, in effect, still stealing from the poorest people in the world?
Of course "The End of Poverty?" can't answer these questions in any adequate or complete fashion. Where it intersects with other drumbeat-of-doom documentaries like "Food Inc." or "An Inconvenient Truth" is in arguing that systematic problems require systematic solutions, and that the basic conceptual model of capitalist economics -- endless and unlimited growth -- is a dangerous fantasy that can only end in disaster. Can this one documentary, with its distinct atmosphere of preaching to the choir, cut through the obscurantist haze that still prohibits frank discussion of this question? That's highly doubtful, but every little step helps.
"The End of Poverty?" is now playing at the Village East Cinema in New York. It opens Nov. 25 in Los Angeles; Dec. 4 in Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Seattle; Dec. 18 in Austin, Texas; and Dec. 30 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Philadelphia and Washington, with more cities and DVD release to follow.
Cynicism is a luxury item. You might be able to afford it, but not everyone can. If you're young, you can roll your eyes at the world without paying much of a price. If you're rich, you can shake your head and sigh from the comfort of your climate-controlled, pest-free, meticulously clean square footage.
But if you're poor or black or overweight or old or handicapped or depressed, if the world isn't coming up roses for you unless you fight hard, every day, to make it work, cynicism can mean a slow downward spiral to death. Once you've suffered loss or stumbled and fallen hard, cynicism looks less like harmless fun and more like quicksand.
Of course we all like to pretend that our nice things and our education and our highly professional, dry-cleaned existence means that we're above hope, that we don't have to believe in something like the little guy does, that we don't have to help out or worry or lend our voices to the voiceless. But that's all an elaborate game of make-believe.
You may be able to afford the luxury of cynicism now. But when cynicism becomes a way of life, eventually, you pay the tax with your soul.
Another brick in the wall
Sure, it's tough to fight your own skepticism when you witness how ugly the world can be, day after day. Now imagine growing up in a place that most people see as ugly: Newark, N.J. Its inhabitants are mostly poor and have been plagued by terrible crime rates for decades. But when you watch Sundance's "Brick City," a five-part miniseries that airs every night this week (10 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21, through Friday, Sept. 25) (and you'd better watch it), you get a different view. Once you get past the fact that you're hearing the same old glowing promises out of Mayor Cory Booker that you've heard from every politician under the sun, once you get past the inherent hopelessness of a former Bloods gang member named Jayda trying to kick the gang life, once you look beyond the same old shots of beleaguered cops and overwhelmed high school teachers and tearful community activists, mourning innocent kids gunned down in the streets, there's something beautiful at the core of this series.
It takes a while to let your cynicism slough off, partially because watching a real-life version of HBO's "The Wire" is a little too brutal to take to heart at first, because you've been trained, by that show and by the local news, to avert your eyes from such a gut-wrenchingly dim scenario. Booker, who comes across as charming and slightly nerdy, is still determined to reduce crime in the city of Newark drastically. He wants to make the streets safe for the children of Newark, and keep more of them in school for longer. Can you feel the deep sighs coming already?
While the access that filmmakers Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin, along with producer Forest Whitaker, managed to get to intimate conversations and backroom meetings is truly impressive, it's not always easy to craft a narrative around an endless flow of dismal planning sessions, homicides, press conferences and the latest fight between Jayda and her boyfriend (a member of the Crips). During the first hour or so, it's tough to see how this story will ever take shape.
And that's not to mention the desperation of this picture: Of course the city is broke. Of course Police Director Garry McCarthy is faced with trying to do more with less, but still has to alternately rally and bully his troops in scenes that could've come straight from David Simon's keyboard. Of course Booker is running on fumes and idealism, repeating his own mantras over and over, trying to get all of the beleaguered city officials and community organizers and cops to catch the spirit. Even when the mayor is full of inspiration and a burning desire to fix his city, most of his city officials look like they could use a stiff drink.
But by the third episode -- and I would beg you to stick with this series until then -- something beautiful starts to reveal itself. Suddenly, we stop seeing Jayda as just another former gang member, or Booker as just another politician, or Ras Baraka, the principal of Central High School in Newark, as just another disappointed school administrator. Suddenly we can see straight through to the hearts and souls of these people. Maybe it just takes two and a half hours of this very patient, day-in-the-life documentary to recognize how special the people on-screen are, or maybe it takes that long for its subjects to forget that the cameras are on, or maybe it just takes a while to appreciate how good filmmakers Levin and Benjamin are at ferreting out salient moments so that we really get to know these subjects.
After some dark moments in the first few hours, Jayda starts to really come alive for the camera. She's obviously smart and dynamic from the beginning, but her ability to connect with younger women only becomes clear when she starts a mentoring group for at-risk high-school-age girls called Nine Strong Women. During a sleepover for the girls at her apartment, Jayda warns them against falling in with the wrong crowd, telling them, "Be careful about who you call a friend." One of the girls is annoyed that Jayda is looking straight at her when she says that.
"You want to know why I look at you? Because you have a beautiful heart and you are gullible as hell. You will believe anything. And that is the worst type of person to be in 2008 living in Newark, New Jersey."
Meanwhile, Jayda's boyfriend Creep, who still hangs out with his fellow Cripps gang members, says he doesn't want to be living in Newark at all. When the two of them go looking for a new apartment to share with their baby, plus Creep's daughter and Jayda's young son, Creep spells it out for Jayda.
Creep: I wanna live ...
Jayda: In a neutral zone.
Creep: ... in the business hood, where I go outside and it's like "How you doing this morning, sir? How you doing?" Fucking suits. That's where I wanna live at.
Jayda: Where in Newark could we find that?
Creep: I ain't say nothin' about Newark.
So why not just move to a prettier place? Sure, some can't afford it. But crucially, a lot of the people we see on-screen aren't merely interested in making their own lives prettier (like so many of us). They're interested in somehow, some way, pulling their community out of a deep, dark pit of despair.
"When you say a kid doesn't want to learn, that's like saying a moth doesn't want to be a butterfly," says Principal Baraka of the challenges of teaching kids with so much turmoil in their lives. "Kids learn every single day. We learn every single day. The question is, what do we learn?"
Baraka and Vice Principal Todd Warren aim to teach their kids lessons that many of them aren't learning at home. In one heartbreaking scene, Warren addresses a group of freshman boys taking part in the Freshman Boys Overnight, a program at Central High that seems to encourage the boys to make the school a sort of second home.
"You're playing around in the classroom, but those kids in [predominantly white] Millburn have their faces in a book," Warren says, but no one looks all that convinced. "But you're too foolish to see that! We're telling you this stuff because we love you, man."
Warren looks around the room and his voice softens. "Some of you don't know anything about real love, though. You've never had any type of interaction with a real man before. Who here is being raised by a woman?" Almost every single kid in the classroom raises his hand.
"Those of you who don't have men in your lives, your fathers, strong male figures, listen. Mr. Baraka and Mr. Warren love you. Mr. Baraka and Mr. Warren are here for you." Even the toughest kids in the room look like they're about to cry when Warren says this.
Boys may always grow up without fathers and Newark may always be a tough place, but this city's heroes give us all something to aspire to. As most of us struggle mightily to improve our own lives, these people fight every day to make the world a safer and better place for their neighbors. In revealing their trials and toils, Sundance's "Brick City" makes our luxuries, from our comforting things to the comfort of our cynicism, look downright foolish by comparison. By resisting the urge to avert our eyes, we can glimpse the blinding beauty that lies in the humblest acts of optimism, generosity and hope.
Clockwise from top left, images from "Fuel," "Crude," "Food Inc." and "The End of the Line"
I say this from the bottom of my heart, with deep conviction: "An Inconvenient Truth" changed the world. Did the Davis Guggenheim-Al Gore PowerPoint-based Oscar winner mark a turning point in global climate change, and the beginning of a carbon-neutral future? Oh, that. I have no idea about that. But it sure changed the world of movies. As any successful film is likely to do, "Inconvenient Truth" established a template for other eco-catastrophe documentaries to follow, and inspired a legion of well-intentioned emulators, wannabes and copycats.
Across the filmland economy, funding dried up for zombie-stripper flicks and Iraq war docs alike, and this year the eco-doc floodgates opened. Filmgoers in 2009 have been barraged with feel-bad flicks, each of them assuring us that the dire plight of the endangered blue-tailed skink, e.g., is dooming our grandchildren to lives of poisoned, skink-free grimness and slavery, and that it is the Unique Responsibility of Our Generation to Do Something. (Cut to mid-level celebrity, say, Eliza Dushku, without much makeup on: "I always thought that skinks were, like, these pretty lizards who lived in my mom's flower pots. I was like everybody else: I didn't understand the ancient wisdom of a simpler time! When you're on the Hollywood Freeway with a triple latte, you're just not confronting the way skinks are bound with the future of our planet!")
I jest, but only sort of. The post-Gore wave of eco-docs has produced some fascinating, information-rich and occasionally beautiful filmmaking, but it also threatens to cancel itself out in a cacophonous roar of competing voices. Can you tell "Earth" apart from "Earth Days"? Is "Food Inc." a sequel to "War, Inc."? (And when is "Sex Inc." coming out?) Most of these movies bring life to the phrase "labor of love," resulting from years of dedicated work and sacrifice at starvation wages. Their directors and producers have defied the odds in getting them released at all, and most have gone on to defy conventional release patterns: They hopscotch from one film festival to the next, screen in church basements and community centers, self-distribute on DVD or online.
Some of these movies will never "succeed," according to the film industry's standards, and they vary enormously when it comes to coherence and cinematic quality. Some are genuine outsider projects, some are made by prestigious documentarians and some are corporate attempts to cash in on eco-chic. But they all represent the tip of an extremely large iceberg, and reflect the fact that environmentalism has become a mass-scale, grass-roots-based movement that can't be controlled by politicians, policy wonks or talking heads. In that sense, maybe these movies will change the world -- but only if you know which ones to catch and which ones to skip. Herewith, Salon's exclusive user's guide to the eco-docs of 2009.
"Fuel" Activist-cum-filmmaker Josh Tickell spent 11 years of his life on this film, but as he appears to have had a blast driving around the country in his goofball, biodiesel-powered van, I suppose it's all good. Pushing two hours in length and chaotically structured, "Fuel" is a high-spirited, pseudo-encyclopedic tour of everything that's wrong with America's energy policy and how it all could be made right through a combination of biodiesel, wind and solar power. Maybe his arguments aren't all as convincing as they look at first glance, but Tickell gets full marks for making an eco-doc designed to uplift and inspire -- it's the Viagra of green movies!
After taking his film (and his crunchy-power vehicles, including a new one fueled with algae) to innumerable film festivals -- and getting short-listed for the '08 documentary Oscar -- Tickell finally has a theatrical distribution deal. "Fuel" opens this week in New York, San Francisco and Washington; and Sept. 25 in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, with lots more cities to follow.
"Crude" Not an eco-doc in the classic sense, Joe Berlinger's fascinating cinéma-vérité exploration of the $27 billion pollution lawsuit filed against Chevron by indigenous groups in Ecuador shares the same consciousness-raising goals and aims at the same audience. Berlinger's fly-on-the-wall methodology ensures that there's plenty of ambiguity here, and he goes to great lengths to include Chevron's point of view (legalistic and inane as it may be). A meaty process film that captures the intersection of global petro-politics, law, inequality and celebrity, "Crude" is thought-provoking and profoundly unsettling. It most definitely does not leave you thinking that everything will be OK if you make your own diesel fuel out of corn husks scavenged from Dumpsters.
"No Impact Man" New York couple Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin, both writers, decide almost on impulse to transform their lifestyle such that they have near-zero environmental impact, meaning no TV, no air conditioning, no product packaging, no food grown outside their home region, etc. (Yeah, yeah -- no toilet paper either.) The result was Beavan's fascinating blog and just-published book, along with this highly entertaining documentary by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, which captures both the problems attendant on worm-composting and lack of refrigeration in the Manhattan summer (more maggots than a Dario Argento movie!) and also the reality-TV-style psychodrama of the Beavan-Conlin marriage. Beavan tends to drive people nuts, while the self-effacing shopaholic Conlin is irresistible.
"The End of the Line" Traveling from the tuna markets of Tokyo -- where some wholesalers reportedly have tons of that delicious red meat frozen against future shortages -- to the streets of London, the straits of Gibraltar and the coast of Senegal, British director Rupert Murray paints a dire but colorful portrait of the global overfishing crisis. A thoroughly depressing catalog of how completely we have devastated the world's oceans, "The End of the Line" argues that many factors have combined to cause a near-catastrophe: rising populations and widespread poverty in the developing world, coupled with the rising popularity of seafood in the metropolitan West and the explosion of high-tech methods for finding and catching ever more fish. Late in the film, some hope is offered: If we can limit our appetite for seafood, especially the large and delicious ocean fish, most species can still recover.
"Food Inc." This eye-opening agitprop doc about the true costs of cheap, corporate food, a collaboration between director Robert Kenner and writers Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and Michael Pollan ("In Defense of Food"), is one of the signal cinematic moments of 2009. Although compared often to "Inconvenient Truth," "Food Inc." represents a much earlier phase of activism. As Pollan said when I interviewed him, the local and organic food movement is about where environmentalism was 40 years ago, just before the first Earth Day. A complex and layered attack on agribusiness and its transformation of America's food economy, Kenner's film both recognizes that corporate food production has had obvious benefits for consumers and argues that in the long run it's unhealthy for everybody. Alternately horrific, humorous and inspiring, "Food Inc." continues to play around the country as an organizing tool for locavores and organic-food mavens.
"At the Edge of the World" This odd, breathtaking high-seas adventure follows the eco-pirates of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (originally a Greenpeace splinter group) as they pursue the Japanese whaling fleet in the ocean off Antarctica. Deliberately controversial, and likely to alienate at least as many viewers as it delights, Dan Stone's doc makes an intriguing companion piece to Louie Psihoyos' vastly more respectable dolphin doc, "The Cove" (see below).
"The Cove" This blend of James Bond-style adventure and Jacques Cousteau-style underwater discovery is beautifully photographed, thematically explosive and often surprisingly funny. It's a smashing filmmaking debut from longtime nature photographer Louie Psihoyos, so why has it underperformed at the box office? Could be that scene where we watch hundreds of dolphins slaughtered in a secret Japanese cove, but I'm just guessing. Still, Psihoyos and his collaborator and star, longtime dolphin activist and former "Flipper" trainer Ric O'Barry, have accomplished at least some of their goals -- this year there was no dolphin massacre in Taiji, Japan, and dolphin meat is off the local school-lunch menu. Definitely a contender in this year's docu-Oscar race.
"Earth Days" A fascinating film with a concept that's difficult to summarize, ace documentarian Robert Stone's latest offering feels like a voyage into a Thomas Pynchon-style alternate reality: One-tenth of the American population demonstrated against pollution and environmental destruction; a 36-year-old ex-Jesuit seminarian whose platform included "exploring the universe" was elected governor of California and appointed an astronaut-turned-hippie as his science advisor; a female college student became an overnight celebrity with an anti-childbirth commencement address titled "The Future Is a Cruel Hoax"; a Republican congressman became the leading environmental exponent in Washington; and the president ordered solar panels installed on the White House roof. Of course it all actually happened, during the now-forgotten historical period before and after the first Earth Day, in 1970. In telling the stories of those people and their era, Stone simultaneously laments the road not taken and suggests we can still learn from it.
Colin Beavan and his daughter at the market
Driven along by Al Gore, the fluctuating price of gasoline, a procession of dire news reports about mounting ecological catastrophe and a vague sense that our civilization is running out of time, most of us are trying to do at least a little about it. We downsize our vehicles, segregate aluminum from newspaper and remember (sometimes) to shut off the air conditioner when we're not home. And we're depressingly confident, the whole time, that whatever we do or don't do won't make a damn bit of difference.
Well, what if it did? What if we could reorder our priorities such that we had dramatically less impact on the environment -- and led happier, less stressful lives at the same time? That was the question that led New York writer Colin Beavan to propose a quixotic, charming, maddeningly naive and borderline-nuts project to his wife, Business Week reporter Michelle Conlin. It's the project that came to be called "No Impact Man," which is the title of Beavan's long-running blog as well as his just-published book and the documentary film about his family's adventures made by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein.
In 2006, Beavan suggested that he, the reality-TV-addicted, espresso-guzzling Conlin and their daughter, Isabella, not yet 2 at the time, should interrupt their relatively normal Manhattan creative-class existence in order to live for an entire year while making no net impact on the environment. None, as in zero. No air conditioning, no TV, no electricity, no gas or oil heat. No takeout containers, no plastic bags, no recycled paper cups from Starbucks. No food grown more than a day's drive from New York City, which meant hardly any winter vegetables beyond cabbage and potatoes. (And no coffee whatsoever, a stark change for Conlin, who sometimes imbibed three or four iced quad-espressos a day.) No commercial soaps, shampoos or cleaning products, "natural" or otherwise. No journeys on planes, trains or automobiles (including the New York subway). Infamously, no toilet paper.
Beavan's book -- its full subtitle is "The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process" -- and Gabbert and Schein's "No Impact Man" documentary are remarkably different experiences. I recommend them both, but where Beavan offers an earnest, searching account of the project's religious-cum-philosophical roots and logistical difficulties, the movie is a hilarious, riveting must-see about a family as it breaks down almost all the way and then reinvents itself.
As Beavan presents her in print, his wife is almost a stock-comedy figure, a shopping-obsessed "Sex and the City" gal who can't tear herself away from the plasma screen and has never so much as cooked a pot of pasta in her life. (Actually, that last part appears to be true.) On screen, though, the quick-witted, winsome, self-effacing Conlin is most definitely the star of the show. Where Beavan is a cloaked persona who can come across as diffident and judgmental, Conlin is completely relatable, as they say in TV, and also follows a far more dramatic and emotional trajectory than he does.
Before the No Impact project begins, Conlin buys a pair of boots for a sum so obscene I won't print it -- and before it ends, she has not merely adjusted to but embraced a lifestyle free of TV shows or new clothes, where instead of eating takeout in front of "American Idol" she eats her husband's cabbage-and-eggplant frittata (again) after walking up nine flights of stairs to their candlelit, unheated apartment.
After a March 2007 New York Times Home Section profile bearing the unfortunate but irresistible headline "A Year Without Toilet Paper," which painted a medium-snarky portrait of the couple's low-wattage existence, Beavan and Conlin first became the center of a media feeding frenzy. Of course their household did not literally reduce its carbon footprint to zero, and of course their year of self-enforced asceticism did not affect global climate change in any meaningful way. But it's unfair to argue that they haven't made a difference.
Beavan's blog and the media coverage have inspired many people to emulate their example, and have provoked disproportionately angry responses from many others. A lot of environmentalists who were initially suspicious of the publicity-stunt aspect of "No Impact Man" have warmed to its effects, and Beavan is highly in demand as nonprofit fundraiser and speaker. That doesn't mean that the rancor has abated from other people who feel criticized, lectured or insulted by Beavan, his worldview and his project. One poster on Gawker suggested that mowing down the Beavan-Conlin family with an Uzi would benefit the environment, and I imagine commenters on this article will come up with colorful images of their own.
If the No Impact Man project was partly a marketing opportunity from its inception -- Beavan intended to write a book all along -- that doesn't make it less sincere, or less of a threat to the dominant ideology of American consumerism. In their foolhardy plunge into uncharted terrain, Beavan and Conlin pose a fundamental challenge to a central tenet of American life: the idea that the "pursuit of happiness" is permanently and necessarily attached to economic growth, to the manufacture and consumption of ever larger quantities of stuff.
If any significant number of Americans downscale their consumption to any significant degree (setting aside the Beavan model) we would see a widespread economic collapse that would make the current downturn look like a glamorous European vacation. If some of those people actually decided, as the Conlin-Beavan household genuinely seems to do, that they were happier with a low-stress, low-consumption existence -- that working all the time and buying more junk did not correlate with happiness -- well, then we'd be forced to deal with a massive restructuring of our social and economic lives. But isn't that day of reckoning coming, one way or another?
Beavan and Conlin called me from their Manhattan apartment, where they were nursing Isabella, now 4, who was home with a bad cold. She broke in occasionally with requests for a drink of water or a bathroom visit, but didn't seem interested in answering my questions. Conlin says that Isabella adjusted seamlessly to the No Impact project, and then to the electricity being switched back on: "She was very Zen or gnostic about it. She just grooved with the moment."
Colin, having read the book and seen the movie, I think they paint really different portraits of the same experience. How do you evaluate the differences and similarities?
Colin Beavan: You know, the book is me telling what I consider to be important about the story. The movie is basically Laura and Justin telling what they consider to be important about the story, and they don't entirely overlap. There's places where I watch the film and go, "Geez, I wish we could have emphasized that more." But given the ideas we're trying to promote, there's tremendous value in having both. The book is in the world for audiences who are likely to be interested in the book, and the movie provides an entry for a completely different audience.
In the book, for example, you gradually out yourself as a Zen Buddhist, and it gradually becomes clear how much that informs your thinking and your decisions. Now, the viewer of the film can watch whole thing and have no idea that that's part of who you are and the choices you've made.
Honestly, the film is 90 minutes long, so it can't accomplish as much. It does provide a certain sense of intimacy that the book cannot, and the book can provide a certain depth that the film cannot. In truth, there were many, many conversations about the values that went into No Impact and they didn't make the cut of the film, and I miss those sometimes. Not necessarily my involvement with Zen Buddhism per se, but the thematic commonalities between religions that "No Impact Man" is based on -- I would have liked to see more of that in the film.
You write a lot about the fact that you see No Impact as rooted in various religious traditions.
There are many commonalities between the religious traditions. They're the ancient roots of wisdom. They're all struggling to tell us how to deal with human existence, and that's what we're struggling with now. All the great religions tell us, at root, to do less harm and more good. Probably the biggest consolation that all the religions give me is the understanding that we're all intimately connected, and not only are we intimately connected, but at a very real level we can't always see, we're actually one. The only thing that really makes any sense is trying to figure out how to get through this together. That is very much at the root of "No Impact Man."
You've had a lot of time to think about why this project pushes so many people's buttons. I mean, a lot of people have been inspired by you. But there are also these violent, negative reactions, and I wonder what you think about those.
There's at least two elements. One is that so many people are just working so hard, trying to do the best by themselves and their families, the people that they love. They don't have any time to themselves, and this so-called American dream is not turning out to be everything it's cracked up to be. So they're not as happy as they thought they would be. And then somebody comes along and says, "Hey, I'm living as environmentally as possible!"And there's an inference that you're not.
So basically, people are like, "I'm working my rear end off, I'm doing my best, and now you're telling me that the way I'm living my life is destroying the planet. Leave me alone!" People are overwhelmed, and I totally get that. We live in overwhelming times. Sometimes the natural reaction is to push the problem, and anybody that's discussing the problem, away from us.
On another level, there are people in the environmental movement who sincerely believe that absolutely the only way forward is through collective action leading to regulatory change, and they consider any emphasis on individual action to be a distraction. My belief is that collective action has not yet reached the head of steam that we need, and therefore that regulatory change is not as strong as we need it to be. We need to find ways of rallying people who are outside the choir and getting them involved. That means cross-aisle support, and part of the way to get that is to examine the intersection between the personal and the political, to say, "How is your life contributing to the problems our culture has?" Once people have skin in the game by examining that level of detail, then you can get them involved in the politics too.
Michelle, both the book and the film present you as going into this almost unintentionally, as if you were barely aware of how big an undertaking this was. Is there a degree of shtick to that, or was it really that way?
Michelle Conlin: Basically, Colin had been writing books and they were historical nonfiction. He told me, "I don't want to do that anymore. I want to write about global warming," and then he figured out a way to write about it. He was so excited about this idea, and I was so excited for him and wanted to be supportive and wifely and all that. So I just said yes, and I didn't fully think through what it would mean. I also didn't really have any idea what I was getting myself into. I just impulsively said yes.
C.B.: To be fair, at that stage of the game neither of us knew what we were getting ourselves into. We didn't understand just how unsustainable our systems were, and how much you have to withdraw yourself to make anything approximating no impact.
In some ways, you seemed to discover and bring together all these themes or trends that already existed, whether it was the local-food movement, the voluntary simplicity movement, the DIY crafting movement. Not to mention cooking at home and growing your own vegetables, which hardly qualify as new inventions or rediscoveries. To what extent were you genuinely naive about that stuff?
As far as the local food movement goes, I was absolutely and completely unaware of it. Of course I knew that the farmer's market existed, but I had always been flummoxed by the farmer's market. You know, a rutabaga. What does one do with a rutabaga? [Laughter.] I was genuinely flummoxed by that. When I say that neither of us knew what we were getting ourselves into, I think that in some ways I believed we'd just buy organic food. And then when I started to research the impacts of our food system, I realized that organic food was an insufficient standard, and we had to move to local food.
I mean, the conceit of the book is that I'm an armchair liberal who spouts off about everything but doesn't do much about it. Of course I had been involved in some political actions but I really didn't know what to do about it. So this really was a journey of enlightenment, in the sense of learning the details.
I get the sense that there are some people in the environmental movement who view you with some bad blood. They see you standing on the shore like Christopher Columbus, saying, "I've discovered a new world!" And they're like, wait a minute. There's already people living here.
M.C.: Honey, let me jump in here, OK? Andrew, I think Colin makes it really super-clear in the book that, like, we really didn't know anything, and there are people who've been working on this stuff for decades, who have dedicated their lives to it. We in no way consider ourselves to have discovered any of this. We're very aware that there's a huge legacy of people who've worked on these issues forever, and we stumbled into all of this in 2006.
C.B.: Basically I'm a communications professional. I'm in the lucky position of taking the work of people who've come before us and to communicate what they've learned. As far as I'm concerned, I'm largely popularizing other people's work.
In terms of that ability to communicate, I wonder if it's actually helpful that before you started this you guys were much closer to the lifestyle of your average urban professional couple. You weren't environmental activists or super-educated organic consumers or whatever.
M.C. I think it is. I don't think we were environmentally awake. I mean, intellectually we knew what was going on, but I don't consider that we were active in the movement or super-conscious in our own life. I think that made the whole thing more interesting.
C.B.: You know what it's like when you're going to write a piece. You start to get obsessed and you want to research it. There was a time period between when we decided we were going to do it and when we actually started, and I deliberately didn't start doing research ahead of time. I thought that story about a naive person who cares but has no idea what to do was really important. I wanted to be like everybody else. I am like everybody else.
M.C.: That was a story I was looking for and wanted to read about, because that was a story I could relate to.
Now, how does your family live today, with the official No Impact project in the past? Have you made permanent logistical and physical changes, or are the effects found somewhere else, in spiritual or psychological ground?
M.C.: I'll answer first just because my answer will probably be shorter. Yes, there are specific physical manifestations to it; we bike and eat local food and all of that. But for me, the spiritual and psychological benefits and dividends were just as deep, if not deeper.
C.B.: There are so many adaptations we made that we kept, but one of the big spiritual or psychological changes for me was the understanding that all of our voices count. All our voices count, and we have a right and a responsibility to talk about how we want to live together. Actually, if we start doing that then change will happen.
M.C.: Can I add one more thing, Colin? I realized early on that we were redesigning our whole lifestyle. That's pretty exciting, and now that we've had that experience, it makes for a very intoxicating adventure, to approach life that way.
Do you honestly wish, in retrospect, that you had never 'fessed up on the whole toilet-paper question?
C.B.: Yeesh, that's a good question. If I have any regrets, it's that at the time of that early publicity blast I was a little bit apologetic about the idea that we need to change our lifestyles as Americans. I didn't say as forcefully as I do now that we need to change substantially -- we emit five times the carbon of the average Chinese person -- and not all of that's going to be achieved by regulation. We have to live more environmentally, and we also have to address our quality-of-life crisis. We need to figure out how to be happier and more environmental at the same time.
As for the T.P. thing, I do prefer that we talk about the kinds of issues that are brought up by the No Impact Man project: individual action or collective action, quality of life vs. standard of living. All sorts of things that have nothing to do with bathroom hygiene.
"No Impact Man" is now playing at the Angelika Film Center in New York and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. It opens Sept. 18 in Chicago, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; Sept. 25 in Denver, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Calif., Seattle and Washington; Oct. 2 in Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, San Diego and St. Louis; Oct. 9 in Cleveland; Oct. 16 in Kansas City; Oct. 23 in Dallas and Houston; and Oct. 30 in Atlanta, with more cities to follow.
Joe Berlinger is such a tireless talker -- a spinner of anecdotes and theories, and alternately an ardent defender and harsh critic of his own work -- that I should let him explain "Crude" in his own words. Briefly, though, this new documentary from the co-director of "Paradise Lost," "Brother's Keeper" and "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" explores the epic-scale, endlessly complicated story of one of the largest lawsuits in history. It's the suit in which the indigenous inhabitants of Ecuador's Amazonian jungle are on the verge of winning a massive judgment from Chevron -- a court-appointed expert has suggested $27 billion -- for the poisoning of their homeland, previously among the most pristine and biodiverse rain forest regions on the planet.
"Crude" sometimes seems like improbable fiction, a story co-authored by Charles Dickens and Che Guevara in which a former oilfield worker named Pablo Fajardo, who still lives in the two-room house where he grew up, is now the plaintiffs' lead attorney, threatening to bring the world's fifth-largest corporation to its knees. One of the story's many oddities is that Chevron was never involved in Ecuadoran oil exploration, or in the alleged systematic and deliberate discharge of oil sludge and contaminated water that has sometimes been called the "Amazon Chernobyl." But when Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, it also took on that company's assets and liabilities, and now must defend itself in a case that has had many unexpected twists and turns.
After lawyers for the 30,000 or so Ecuadoran plaintiffs filed suit in the United States, Chevron fought for years to have jurisdiction returned to Ecuador, probably assuming that that country's traditional pro-business oligarchy would make the whole thing go away. Sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for: Now Ecuador has a left-leaning president, Rafael Correa, who is allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and openly sympathetic to the anti-Chevron case. As Berlinger's camera captures, the trial was largely conducted outdoors, on the site of the alleged contamination, with soil samples taken in public with the cameras rolling. Chevron's attorneys respond with various contradictory claims: That sludge in the ground isn't dangerous; it isn't ours; it wasn't taken from the right place; people shouldn't be living here anyway.
Over the course of four years in diverse and difficult conditions, Berlinger captures Fajardo and his American consultant, Steven Donziger, as they travel from Ecuador to New York to Houston and back. He meets residents and nurses in the Cofán indigenous community who discuss the cancer clusters and epidemic skin diseases found in the area around the contaminated waterways. He follows Trudie Styler, the jet-set fashion-plate spouse of Sting, as she tours the region and renders it an international cause célèbre. At the last minute, just as Berlinger was preparing the film for Sundance this year, he was granted interviews with a senior Chevron scientist and a corporate counsel, who assured him that A) everything is fine in the affected region, and B) we're off the hook, legally speaking, even if it isn't.
Berlinger is a leading practitioner of the cinéma-vérité method, which avoids voice-over narration or other devices aimed at directing the reader toward a specific conclusion. This is somewhat unusual in a film that seems so clearly a work of advocacy, but as he explained during a phone call that was scheduled for 15 minutes and stretched to 45, his job is to convince the uncommitted viewer that what Texaco did in the Amazon was an immense moral crime -- not to create agitprop on behalf of the plaintiffs in a specific lawsuit. First, here's the official trailer for "Crude":
Joe, I was thinking that the vérité method must have posed a special challenge in this case. You're not in the business of telling the audience who is right and who is wrong, and that comes with certain advantages and certain disadvantages for a storyteller.
Definitely. I don't believe in voice-over narration, but voice-over narration helps you speed the story along and gets you through difficult moments you may not have coverage on. This film was one of the hardest editing challenges I've ever faced, because there's a complicated 13-year history behind this lawsuit, which you have to dole out to the audience so they understand the context. Then you can get to the present-tense story.
I think my point of view is all over this film. This film has been criticized at film festivals by more activist-oriented folks, who think I've given Chevron too much screen time and think that I need to have a clearer point of view. But I have a certain view of how to engage an audience. I'm a pretty active television producer and executive producer, and I see a lot of environmental and human-rights films that have this style of banging a singular message over somebody's head. That's a very different theatrical experience from engaging the audience to be a judge or a juror, to weigh the pros and cons of all the issues.
I think it makes a more persuasive film, and, ironically, a more effective advocacy film, if you allow people to arrive at a point of view on their own. When you whitewash certain troubling aspects of a situation because you think, oh, it takes away from the main point of view that Chevron is evil -- that makes the film less honest and less interesting and less real. You end up just preaching to the converted, when the mission ought to be to bring people who aren't sure about what they think into your camp. A non-narrated approach, a warts-and-all portrait of all sides, is to my mind a more persuasive moviegoing experience.
Right. I mean, just in terms of the lawsuit, I didn't come out of this film absolutely sure who was going to win, or who should win. The issue of liability seems immensely complicated, and I'm not sure if anybody really understands it.
People have said to me, "You give Chevron too much airtime. You don't seem utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit." Well, I'm not utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit, because I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Specifically, I'm not smart enough or well enough equipped -- I'm not a judge or a scientist, and I haven't read the 100,000 pages in binders in that judge's office. I can't tell you whether Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legalese to prevail in that lawsuit. But I can tell you that some things are larger than the lawsuit, and that the moral responsibility lies at their door. You don't go into somebody's backyard and treat it the way they treated it. I don't care about the legality. Manifest destiny was a legal philosophy that justified all sorts of terrible acts in this country. The Nuremberg racial laws made discrimination against Jews legal in Germany. So I can't tell you whether Chevron should win or lose in this lawsuit, but I don't think they have morality on their side.
The film to me is not about the lawsuit. After having spent almost four years on this situation, I see a certain inadequacy to the legal structures in place to deal with these human rights and environmental crises. It has taken 17 years to get to this point, and it will probably take another 10 or 15 years for the whole thing to be appealed and counter-appealed and worked out, and then God knows how long before payment is made. That's just too long. Generation after generation are suffering. While this legal proceeding goes on, people are dying and generations are being affected.
So I'm comfortable showing both sides of the lawsuit, to show how messy it is and how long it takes. Also, I think truth rises to the top. No matter how much corporate-speak legalese they wrap themselves up in, the ultimate message of the film is that for 600 years white people have treated indigenous people abysmally. It's a part of our history we really don't grapple with. I mean, at some level we know, in the back of our heads, that that Jack in the Box over there used to be a Cherokee village, and we moved these people out of sight.
Here was the big epiphany for me in making this movie -- it seemed like that was something that happened in the distant past, but the reality is that multinational corporations of the late 20th century, particularly in the extractive industries, are just the modern-day continuation of this shameful treatment of indigenous people. The Chevron lawyer in the film says, "People shouldn't be living here. This is an industrial zone." No, sorry. People have been living here for millennia. So I think this is an advocacy film. It's an advocacy film on behalf of indigenous people who were fucked over by Catholic missionaries, and then by their own governments, and then by the oil companies.
On one side you have this enormous oil company, and on the other side you have this former oilfield worker just out of law school, and they're fighting it out in the legal system of a country that, let's face it, has a long record of cronyism and corruption. It doesn't seem like a fair fight.
Chevron fought for years to get the case moved to Ecuador, and I don't think they ever imagined it would go to trial. At the time Ecuador was run by a military junta that was very pro-business, run by the Spanish-descended oligarchy. It was a very comfortable and cozy relationship: extracting minerals and fucking over the indigenous population. I don't think they counted on a couple of things that have taken place that happened that, luckily for me, were very cinematic. One of them was the emergence of this local populist hero, Pablo Fajardo. A local oilfield worker, impoverished but horrified by the humiliation of the workers and the environmental degradation, pulls himself up by the bootstraps and gets educated, gets a law degree, and his very first legal case -- which gains traction and results in at least a moral victory -- is against the fifth-largest company in the world. You simply couldn't make that up.
Chevron also didn't count on the emergence of a global environmental movement and the rise of mistrust of large corporations and their way of doing business, of pursuing profit at all costs. Then there was the change of regime in Ecuador, the election of Rafael Correa, who gets a bad rap in this country as a left-wing, anti-corporate protégé of Hugo Chávez. And a lot of that is accurate, to be fair. But he's the first president to visit the region, the first one to have some sympathy for the indigenous people and the first one to eschew cozy relationships with the extractive industries. Ecuador actually passed certain constitutional rights for flora and fauna last year, as a demonstration of their new commitment to the environment. Correa is having mixed results, but instead of extracting the oil, he wants to sell the oil rights to people who will keep it in the ground.
There are a lot of fascinating characters in the film, but I was really interested in Sara McMillan, the environmental scientist Chevron supplied to you at the last minute. She says everything is fine in Ecuador, there's no problem, if people are getting sick it's not our fault. She's very reassuring and comes off as really sincere. If she's lying, she's doing an extraordinarily good job of it.
She does come across as sincere, and I think she is. That's one of the deeper and more troubling aspects of those interviews. I think she believes every word coming out of her mouth. She's been down there, but she's drunk the Kool-Aid.
It reminds me of our earlier film, "Paradise Lost" [about the dubious conviction of the "West Memphis 3" on murder charges], when co-director Bruce Sinofsky and I were so flabbergasted at what was going down that we'd pull the judge aside, or the prosecutor, and ask them, "Are you guys kidding?" It became very clear that the judge, the prosecutor and the chief inspector had utterly convinced themselves of the righteousness of their mission and the evilness of Damien Echols [accused of masterminding the killings]. It's not that they were covering something up. It's more difficult to change that mind-set than it is to expose a coverup.
It's the same thing with this woman from Chevron. I believe she believes every word that comes out of her mouth. That to me is scary, and it's a signal of institutional denial. We're not talking about bad individuals, we're talking about an institution with no regard for indigenous people.
Another ambiguous area in "Crude" is the presence of Trudie Styler, Sting's wife. On one hand, she's clearly done a lot for the Amazonian people, and has raised the international profile of the case tremendously. On the other hand, you've got the bogus architecture of celebrity, and this beautiful, well-mannered English lady showing up in an outfit that cost more than every physical object in the Cofán village, all put together.
Absolutely. I have tremendous regard for Trudie and Sting. The only tangible benefit these people have received in 17 years of outside involvement are the water-filtration systems Trudie brought to the region. She and Sting have been talking about the rain forest and the rights of indigenous people for many years, long before celebrity drive-by cause-embracing had become favorable.
But the film is observing and commenting upon that uncomfortable intersection between celebrity culture and social activism. It is a shame that only when the wife of a rich and famous rock star comes to town, this case gets kicked up a notch. There are many places around the world that don't have a film and don't have a rock star or a celebrity to help them.
To go back to "Paradise Lost," Damien Echols is alive today -- and I don't say this arrogantly -- because the film produced a great outpouring of support from people like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and Norman Lear. There were a tremendous amount of people who saw that movie and joined an international movement. The film came out at just the right time, just when the Internet was becoming a communication device in a big way. Lots of money has been raised, and if it hadn't been for that outpouring of support, Damien might not be alive today. I don't think the state of Arkansas has the balls to inject the guy, because of all the international attention and celebrity involvement.
I bring that up because that's an example of a guy being lucky, because a film was made. I can't tell you how many letters I've gotten over the years from wives or mothers or girlfriends of people on death row who claim they're innocent. Of course, not everybody is innocent, I'm not that naive. But those people don't have a film or a celebrity, and it's the same thing with these human-rights cases and pollution cases. This is just one part of the world that's been ravaged by the oil industry. They happen to have a celebrity involved and a film being made. The film is definitely a comment on that -- not just on Trudie's involvement but the film's involvement. It's a shame that that's what it takes to move the needle.
"Crude" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens Sept. 18 in Los Angeles; Sept. 25 in New Orleans, San Diego and San Francisco; Oct. 1 in Toronto; Oct. 2 in Chicago; Oct. 9 in Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas; Oct. 16 in Coral Gables, Fla., Denver and Santa Fe, N.M.; and Oct. 23 in Seattle and Washington, with more cities to follow.
Argot Pictures
An image from "American Casino."
If you're having a hard time getting your head around exactly what happened in the historic meltdown of America's home-mortgage market, you're not alone. As the wife-and-husband investigative team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn suggest in their new documentary, "American Casino," nobody fully understands it: Not the bankers and brokers who sold subprime mortgages (often using deceptive tactics or disingenuous language), not the Wall Street wizards who carved them up into ever more esoteric financial instruments, not the free-market wise men like former Fed chair Alan Greenspan or former Sen. Phil Gramm, and certainly not the ordinary citizens who believed they were fulfilling the American dream and wound up losing their homes, their financial security and their self-respect.
Actually, the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.
We meet some of those people too; the Cockburns focus in particular on the African-American community of Baltimore, a city devastated by the tidal wave of foreclosures. Of course foreclosed properties can be found in virtually every neighborhood of every town and city, and at every income level. But Latinos and African-Americans are several times more likely to be affected than whites, and while the problem is undeniably complicated, that almost certainly reflects the enduring legacy of racism. In the 1990s and 2000s, neighborhoods that had previously been "redlined" by traditional lenders became targeted by unregulated and unscrupulous vendors of subprime mortgages, who neither knew nor cared whether borrowers were likely to default on those loans. As we now know, the results were toxic.
One of the film's sad ironies is that middle-class homeowners like Denzel Mitchell, a Baltimore high-school teacher, or Patricia McNair, a family therapist, might well have qualified for conventional loans from normal banks. (One survey mentioned in the film suggests that at least half the people who applied for subprime mortgages in 2006 could have qualified for prime mortgages.) Instead, they were enticed into too-good-to-be-true first and then second mortgages that adjusted sharply upward, which they couldn't realistically afford. Both people are aware that their own lack of financial sophistication is partly to blame for their predicament, but that does nothing to lessen the heartbreak as McNair and her husband have to leave the appealing family home where her adult children grew up, or as Mitchell must abandon his organic vegetable garden and the Tuskegee Airmen-themed bedroom for his little boys.
But if you want to blame somebody for what happened to Mitchell, McNair and millions of other Americans, the place to point the finger is at the fervid deregulation advocated by Greenspan and enacted by Congress under the whip of Gramm and other free-market ideologues. Such laissez-faire reforms created a wide-open marketplace where bankers and brokers could sell whatever extortionate mortgage deals they wanted to whomever they wanted, while lying to consumers about what they were getting and lying to lenders about the borrower's income and assets. Meanwhile, as one anonymous former Bear, Stearns banker tells the Cockburns, Wall Street securities dealers carved up packages of mortgages into abstruse, "fourth-dimensional" instruments to be sold to "idiots."
"American Casino" is of necessity a fragmentary tale; it was being filmed in 2008 as the crisis broadened and deepened, with events unfolding too fast for the Cockburn cameras. But while the mortgage crisis still awaits a rigorous deconstruction along the lines of Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," this film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms. While the stories of Denzel Mitchell and Patricia McNair made me want to weep, the film's most memorable images stem from the Sisyphean task of Jared Dever, a bright and handsome local official in Riverside County, Calif., whose job is to control the county's mosquito epidemic, largely caused by the fetid, abandoned swimming pools behind foreclosed suburban homes.
Dever patrols a nightmarish, new-but-decrepit landscape straight out of the fiction of J.G. Ballard, carefully checking empty houses for signs of meth labs or marijuana grow zones before attacking the pools, whose algae-green water is full of abandoned patio furniture, tires and sports equipment, along with millions of mosquito larvae and the minnows who live on them. I'm not sure that hosing down the whole subdivision with Malathion is any kind of answer. Civilization didn't leave much of an imprint on that place. Now that the bankers have sucked out all its supposed economic value, we might as well drain the pools, knock down the houses and let the coyotes and rattlesnakes take over.
"American Casino" is now playing at Film Forum in New York. It opens Sept. 11 in Denver and Pittsburgh and Sept. 18 in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.
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