| Review |
Leonardo DiCaprio served as Al Gore’s spear carrier at last year’s Academy Awards show, where “An Inconvenient Truth” won the Oscar for Best Documentary, but he’s now moved up to the starring role in another monitory film about the dangers of global warming.
Unlike Gore in the earlier picture, however, DiCaprio doesn’t dominate “The 11th Hour,” at least not in his on-camera role (he’s also one of the producers and writers). He serves as periodic narrator, popping up occasionally to introduce a new segment or recapitulate a previous one. The bulk of the film is instead a cavalcade of talking heads—scientists and activists for the most part—alternating with footage of natural disasters that are characterized as the effect of the warming process on the earth’s atmosphere, and of the impact of human actions on the situation. The primary culprit is identified as the use of fossil fuels and the corporate interests that employ their profits to influence the government not to promote alternative energy sources with adequate zeal—and indeed, in some cases actually to distort scientific data to derail it. In its final reels, the picture turns to practical suggestions about steps that could be taken immediately to address a problem that, as the title suggests, is at so critical a stage that it may lead to the extinction of a great many species of animal life (including the human race) that currently inhabit the earth, just as previous climate changes in the distant past had done. The thrust is that man must learn to use methods that replenish resources rather than simply wasting them, following nature’s example rather than those of generations past. As many of the commentators argue, it’s not the technology that’s lacking, but the will to employ it.
This isn’t a new argument—Gore had already presented much of what’s included here—but “The 11th Hour” offers a wider range of evidence and fewer statistics and graphs, as well as an array of notable figures in support of its thesis—people as varied as James Woolsey, Mikhail Gorbachev, James Hillman and Stephen Hawking, to name but a small fraction of the more than fifty interviewees who appear and reappear throughout the film’s ninety-minute running-time. So what it lacks in surprise it certainly makes up for in breadth.
That doesn’t extend, however, to the inclusion of opposing points of view. Aside from a brief shot of Oklahoma Senator James Imhofe’s notorious 2003 denunciation of global warming as a hoax, the film presents its viewpoint straight-on.
That probably means it will have trouble finding a home in the very place where (especially given DiCaprio’s presence) it might find a ready audience and do the most good—the schools. Efforts to employ it for educational purposes and reach the younger generation who would be especially receptive to its message would probably be opposed by deniers demanding equal time for opposing points of view under the same specious pretext of “let all flowers bloom” often voiced to promote the teaching of creationism as well as evolution in public schools.
As a result, “The 11th Hour” may wind up being viewed primarily by those who already agree with its message. But even if it becomes little more than a case of preaching to the choir, it’s still a pretty sound sermon—though it isn’t likely to bring DiCaprio an Oscar, too.
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