Beyond the Multiplex

Leonardo DiCaprio wants you to save the world. Plus: A chat with the man who gave Brad Pitt his start (interview and podcast).

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Leonardo DiCaprio, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex, Salon Conversations

Aug. 16, 2007 |

Making independent movies at all is something of a noble but foolish crusade. In "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," director Kirby Dick estimates that 95 percent of commercial movie-theater screens in the United States show only pictures made by the six big Hollywood studios. In fairness, I don't know how Dick is counting the semi-independent "mini-majors," like Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse, but however you cut up the pie, the indie slice is pretty tiny.

That said, this week's lineup of crusading flicks is an especially inspiring one. Every film on the dance card could be my leading item in an ordinary week, and every filmmaker has more in mind than empty-headed entertainment. Arguably, you won't see a more important movie this year than "The 11th Hour" (co-produced and co-written by Leonardo DiCaprio), whose aim is nothing less than mobilizing an entire generation to save the world from ecological meltdown. Sure, there will be eye-rolling from predictable quarters: Hollywood liberals! Preaching at us from their hilltop-mansion cocaine parties about how we should recycle our toilet water! First of all, the movie's nothing like that. Second of all, if those thoughts enter your mind it's because Dick Cheney put them there.

We've got other crusaders this week too: I visit with veteran director Tom DiCillo, a certifiable Don Quixote of the indie scene who's just trying to keep a tiny corner of the market open to his bittersweet fables of fame, corruption and redemption. Jason Kohn checks in with the dazzling "Manda Bala," which simultaneously tries to reinvent the documentary and explain the terrifying and violent conundrum that is contemporary Brazil. Chinese director Zhang Yang proclaims the values of classic cinema in a marvelous and subtle family epic, and Seth Gordon finds a Shakespearean (or possibly Spenserian) tale of daring, nobility and evil in the quest for the all-time high score in Donkey Kong.

But even Gordon's "King of Kong" might not be the most brilliantly silly movie of the week. That honor belongs to the delightful sci-fi superhero pastiche "Zebraman," a family film from a most unlikely source, Japanese horror maestro Takashi Miike. And in terms of pictorial elegance and philosophical depth, neither "Manda Bala" nor "The 11th Hour" is actually the best documentary this week. That goes to "Primo Levi's Journey," an extraordinary odyssey across the paradoxical landscape of contemporary Europe with Italian director Davide Ferrario. I know, I know; you're at the beach this week, you can't be bothered with any of this stuff. People, I'm telling you: Take notes or bookmark this page or something. These movies will keep you engrossed well into the fall.

"The 11th Hour": Press 1 to buy more cheap crap you don't really want, or press 2 to save the human species and its planet
If the success of "An Inconvenient Truth" was rooted in the improbable charisma of a symbolic and tragic hero of American politics -- a man about whom almost nobody feels neutral -- the power of the devastating new documentary "The 11th Hour," which calls on a large cast of scientists and intellectuals to discuss a much broader problem, is more abstract. I hope that doesn't automatically equate to a smaller audience, because "The 11th Hour" is arguably a more important movie, which more clearly lays out what must be done to save the world, and how we can begin.

Yes, "11th Hour" was co-produced and co-written by Leonardo DiCaprio, but he appears as narrator for perhaps four or five minutes of screen time, and doesn't leave much of an impression. If anything, I'm concerned that DiCaprio's involvement will lead people to assume that "11th Hour" is some kind of movie-star feel-good project. It definitely isn't. Directors Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners (they are sisters) have crafted a haunting, elegiac history of how human beings have brought the planet to the edge of a precipice, and call upon an impressive array of thinkers to discuss how, and whether, we can avoid the abyss that waits below.

It's never all that helpful just to list the talking heads who appear in a documentary, but what's so remarkable about Petersen and Conners' experts is the sheer breadth of expertise they offer. There are big thinkers able to discuss the overarching topics of human history and technology, like environmental scientists Stephen Schneider and David Suzuki, mathematician Stephen Hawking, and authors Nathan Gardels, Richard Heinberg and Bill McKibben.

Every so often in the movie, one of those guys drops the kind of paradigm-shifting bomb that clears your mind and your sinuses. Suzuki observes that the specific evolution of the human brain, which allowed us to conquer the planet and ensure our species' survival, has now put both the species and the planet in grave peril. Gardels summarizes the problem of consumer society in a single sentence: "You can never get enough of what you don't really want." Thom Hartmann says that we've been borrowing the energy of "stored sunlight" for the last 150 years, without developing a strategy about what to do as it gets harder and harder to find.

Just as important, at least in deflecting right-wing naysayers and critics, is the fact that the filmmakers call on numerous experts in specific scientific or philosophical disciplines to illuminate particular problems and their potential solutions. They've got engineers, architects, economists, physicians, oceanographers, land-use geographers, theologians and environmental scientists. They've got eco-activists, New Age gurus and Native American spiritual leaders, sure. But they've also got a former World Bank senior economist (Herman Daly), a former head of the CIA (James Woolsey) and a one-time world leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient (Mikhail Gorbachev).

What all these people have to say adds up to a fairly simple message: You can't separate one environmental issue, like global warming, from a huge, interconnected complex of issues that include air and water pollution, deforestation and habitat destruction, hurricanes and floods, famine and drought, and the toxic dumping that is poisoning poor communities all over the world. Nor, in the final analysis, can you separate environmental and economic problems. The global environmental catastrophe is not a problem for rich, white Westerners to worry about; if anything, rich, white Westerners will face its most devastating effects last. And finally, it's really not a question of "saving the planet" but of saving ourselves. In the long, long arc of genetic and geological history, the planet will probably be OK. Whether people will still be able to live on it -- that we don't know.

I'm sure there are contentious aspects to the arguments presented in "The 11th Hour," but even President Bush, operating an administration that is virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil industry, has expressed the view that we need to break our dependence on fossil fuels. In a sense, the filmmakers and their sources argue, the problem and its solutions are straightforward. We need to transform the world's economy, and do it yesterday. Yes, some groundbreaking research is still needed, but it's not as if the technology for both intermediate solutions (hybrid and electric cars, biodiesel, wind farms) and more long-term ones (solar power and possibly hydrogen fuel cells) does not exist.

Still, if these people are right and we've now arrived at virtually the last moment for avoiding total disaster, the obstacles are daunting, even terrifying. On one hand, no political leaders anywhere in the world -- not even the pious bureaucrats of the European Union -- have come near the kind of mega-Manhattan Project determination needed to address these issues. But we can't really blame the shortsightedness and corruption of politicians, which is after all their nature; that's like blaming an alligator for eating chickens. If we're not willing to rouse ourselves, individually and collectively, from the consumerist stupor that defines life in, well, everyplace where people aren't literally starving to death, then perhaps the species isn't worth saving. Me, I'm going to get started on that soon. As soon as I buy some of that cheap New Jersey gas, drive the minivan home from IKEA and find a goddamn parking place.

"The 11th Hour" opens Aug. 17 in New York and Los Angeles, with wide national release to follow.

Next page: Tom DeCillo's fascination with fame