‘Earth Days’’ is the rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world. Not that the environmentalists interviewed would stop us, mind you. But in reconstructing the rise of the American environmental movement, filmmaker Robert Stone creates a simmering, thoughtful, visually absorbing history out of the experiences of a handful of the people who have dedicated their lives to keeping the planet from collapse. They’re too busy talking about the alarms they sounded in the 1960s and ’70s to be flagrantly alarmist now.
Earth Days
When the green movement began
Of course, nostalgia is not what Stone is up to, either - not strictly. He wants to provide some perspective on today’s ecological crises and the debates over such crises. That’s the thing about looking back discreetly. The present resonates all too well in the past.
The movie shows a group of notable environmental activists - author Paul Ehrlich, former congressman Pete McCloskey, Dennis Hayes, who coordinated the first Earth Day, to name a few - back when they were treated like young Cassandras. It took a great deal of effort to convince the media and the government to take seriously their prophesies of catastrophe (overpopulation, pollution, deforestation, and on and on). Their seriousness makes today’s eco-stuntpeople seem slightly foolish.
Stone encases his history in montages built almost entirely out of stock footage and an original score by Michael Giacchino, who’s composed music for everything from Pixar’s “Ratatouille’’ to ABC’s “Lost.’’ And it takes about 20 minutes for doubt about this approach to go away. Stone quickly introduces his nine cast members by category: the Biologist (Ehrlich), the Astronaut (Rusty Schweickart), the Motivator (L. Hunter Lovins), the forecaster (Dennis Meadows), and, for their interviews, has them sit in front of various nighttime scenes. We see brush, we see stars. While they talk, Giacchino’s score works hard to produce the Philip Glass experience.
But once the earnest throat-clearing is over, Stone’s central idea emerges. For many members of the generation that grew up comfortably ensconced in the trappings of the American middle class, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring’’ hit like a bomb in 1962. The book presented a world poisoned by pesticides and other chemical pollutants. To underscore its point, Stone (who edited the movie with Don Kleszy ) finds footage of children lunching at a picnic table as a cloud of gas descends on them. They keep eating, anyway. That’s followed by a scene of a woman spraying her kitchen with an aerosol can. Giacchino’s music brings out the funny, scary science fiction lurking in those scenes.
Advertisement
Advertisement