Avi Lewis’s film about climate change, based on Naomi Klein’s book of the same name, opens with a confession from the author: “I’ve always kind of hated films about climate change”. She lists their faults: they’re boring, they’re presumptive, they always, always include shots of polar bears.
It’s a bold move for any documentary, let alone one with such a hyperbolic title, to flame its antecedents. Klein’s absolutely right. Climate change documentaries struggle to make the story personal. The breadth of the problem is too large to filter through relatable characters easily. Unfortunately Lewis’s film - despite its good looks and fine intentions - fails in exactly the same ways. It’s sometimes boring, it makes assumptions about its audience. It does, to its credit, go easy on the polar bears.
The arguments from Klein’s well-reviewed book are simplified and a little muddled in the film. The thrust here seems to be that our listlessness in the face of the devastating effects of climate change is not – as we’re often told - the result of human nature. It’s instead due to a 400-year-old story we’ve told ourselves about nature being a force that we have mastered. And about how capitalism was established on that, allowing us to disconnect ourselves from the natural world to the extent that it’s still difficult for some of us to take environmental apocalypse seriously. These thought processes are, when you think about it, products of human nature too. But Lewis struggles to present that complexity in the film.
Instead we’re taken on a world tour of the communities who are fighting back against the exploit-and-move-on free market mindset. We start at the Alberta tar sands in Klein’s native Canada, where “the overburden” (pesky things like trees, grass, soil, clay) is being stripped from hundreds of thousands of square miles to get to the oil reserves underneath. We’re introduced to the miners – well-paid itinerant workers with no connection to the land – and to the indigenous people who call it home. The tribe’s argument is water-tight and their passion evident, but neither Klein nor Lewis finds a way to break from convention. Put cruelly: we’ve seen native people crying on camera before. There’s no depth to Klein’s on-screen relationship to her subjects (she’s shown scribbling on a pad, tapping on a laptop, staring absently at landfill), so they become that worst of environmental documentary cliches: the Other people that climate change is happening to.
It’s a problem of scale. A macro argument is being filtered through people’s local concerns, but without getting to know the subjects, you can understand their suffering, but can’t feel it. We’re told that in Beijing the smog is so bad that sometimes people are unable to leave their houses for half of the days in a year. That’s an amazing concept, but couldn’t we be shown what’s it like for one family to live like that, rather than learning it through stats?