SFIFF Dispatch. 2.

Everything's Cool [site], which premiered at Sundance (where a section of the film was shot), is certainly a more affable and "up" documentary about global warming - as much as that's possible - than An Inconvenient Truth. Rather than using Power Point presentations, the filmmakers Judith Helfand and Daniel B Gold (Blue Vinyl) went on a road trip to see just how much - or how little - Americans really understand about global warming.

"One day soon, Jesus Christ is your savior, you're gonna be home with him, and [global warming] isn't gonna matter," says one Christian woman ominously in the film's opening credits. The beginning sets the film up to be more of a literal road trip but instead it becomes an amiable hodgepodge of characters and debates about the subject.

Of course, the hope is that Everything's Cool, shot in 2004 and 2005, is already becoming more quaint, given An Inconvenient Truth's popularity and the gradual consciousness-raising going on in the media. That's the hope anyway, but sadly, there's still a ways to go.

The film centers on a group of people who are all in their own way messengers on the subject of climate change. Ross Gelbspan, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, the first investigative journalist to take on the subject of global warming author of the book The Heat is On, becomes the film's main character. Bill McKibben is the author of Deep Economy and a passionate, frustrated environmentalist. Meteorologist Heidi Cullen, respectful, non-partisan, but definitely a believer, hosts the weekly global warming program Forecast Earth on the Weather Channel. She went from getting 3 minutes to 30 - a sign of progress.

Scientists James Hansen of NASA and Rick Piltz, both of whom were essentially excommunicated from the government, are also interviewed.

And then there's a group of guys in Utah who are working on perfecting and converting to biodiesel fuel (a pleasing side story, even though it distracts from the thrust of the main narrative).

Also included here are Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, co-authors of The Death of Environmentalism, the so-called "bad boys of American environmentalism," whose new approach - listen to people instead of telling them what's what, gather information and treat it sympathetically - has made them controversial in some circles. Their points are quite valid, even if they can be overly dismissive of every aspect of environmentalism; in other words, by making their point about how negative the movement has been, they come across as divisive and negative themselves. Still, there's validity to their argument that the movement needs to reconsider how it's coming across, and it's to the film's credit that it includes them here.

As counterpoints to the cause of educating the masses on global warming, the film also gives us the doubters (essentially lobbyists) like Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a front for energy corporations posing as a think tank. Everything's Cool does a good job of deconstructing who Ebell and Cato Institute representatives and other anti-global warming policy makers and discreditors really represent, and how for years the media tried to show the "two sides of the issue for [the sake of] balanced journalism." These spokespeople are good at their jobs, and it's made scientists exasperated. 99 percent of the world's scientists believe humans have sped up and increased the Earth's temperature at an alarming rate. And yet statistically, over the last 10 years, the American media has had a disproportionate amount of coverage casting doubt on global warming - about 45 percent according to the Harper's Index.

The film also gives us some of the debate over The Day After Tomorrow, showing Hollywood overtly hyping the issue (along with GreenPeace's amusing response to it) in order to give the naysayers more ammunition. Al Gore's even more appropriate response is that the Bush administration's reaction to global warming is far more fictional than anything depicted in the film.

The film's editing here can be ill-focused, jumbled, jumping from one person or subject to the next - all interconnected by the greater subject here, the perception of climate change - but in ways that can leave a viewer a little groundless as the film wanders about. A sequence taking us to a remote Alaskan village where you can actually see global warming in action - the permafrost basically defrosting - feels a little disjointed. The village debates whether to pick up and move because of soil erosion, but it's not entirely clear in the film how connective the erosion is with the permafrost degradation.

Everything's Cool also goes back in time a bit to show Hansen's battle with other government reps and to Gelbspan's fascinating research on the government's covering up of information to protect corporate interests. "People still don't get it," Gelbspan reflects sadly. Both Hansen and Gelbspan speak to the burden of having the knowledge they do, and the subsequent feelings of hopelessness, of "why bother?"

But the film ends on a hopeful note, with a huge rally in Vermont led by McKibben. Everything's Cool, in its own affable, low-key way, shows how that's been changing in the last couple of years, doing about as much to put forth the case for recognizing and taking action against global warming as An Inconvenient Truth.

Posted by dwhudson at May 3, 2007 1:01 PM