The wisdom of hindsight, today
Monday morning is a good time for film distributors to get at film critics. Emerged from the weekend, we are fragile, vulnerable and all but photophobic. Bright lights and noises disturb us. Herded into a carbon-efficient press show – no coffee from Java, albeit a rainforestful of press handouts – we sit down before The Age of Stupid. This is the latest climate change documentary and it lectures us sternly and pitilessly – yet also intelligently and provokingly – for 89 minutes.
The title tells all. The word “stupid” is used as in “it’s the ecology, stupid”; the word “age” as in “you felt young when you came into the theatre, but awful warnings can age you mightily”. Soon we feel nearly as old as Pete Postlethwaite, playing the choric old-timer who mans an archive in 2055 and punches a screen to conjure the film gobbets that explain to us why and how Planet Earth – sometime around AD Now – committed suicide.
The six stories he shows are all real. There is the American palaeontologist who helps Shell find offshore oil, while seen moonlighting with heroic incongruity, in one sequence, as a Hurricane Katrina rescuer. There is the aspiring Nigerian doctor growing up in a village whose waters are polluted by petrochemicals. There is the English windfarm developer failing, mostly, to sell windfarms. How we critics – by now properly aroused – seethed at the Bedfordshire villagers united in protest against the turbines. “Fogeys! Luddites!” we snarled, before each of us remembered his tally of air-flights during the past year and retreated into guilty passivity.
The Age of Stupid presses all the right buttons. More cleverly, it chooses to leave some buttons unpressed. In one story, a jovial entrepreneur in India is shown launching a new low-cost airline. Neither Postlethwaite, as chorus, nor Franny Armstrong as director (last conscience-raiser, McLibel) bestows any critical inflection on these scenes. We – given the proper, arduous responsibility – are left to admire or anathematise.
The film’s star is surely the French climbing guide who has watched his Alpine glaciers evaporate. Whitehaired veteran Fernand Pareau could be an Adorable Snowman or a grizzled “Not-Yeti”: a man determined to keep crying “Pas encore!”, with doomed defiance, as the precious frozen tracts dwindle to trickles and his tourists descend by ladders into ravines once brimful with ice.
We are destroying our habitat. We are the new dinosaurs doomed to extinction. The Age of Stupid extends its multimedia claws (websites, television ads), asking you to help. Save a forest; take a train; hug an iceberg. My chosen task will be to kidnap every windfarm protester, forcing him/her to read the complete works of Miguel De Cervantes, wherein it is written: “Thou shalt not go up against windmills, or not without the risk of appearing foolish, dotardly and antediluvian.”
