With the exception of Leonardo DiCaprio, who produced and hosts this trenchant and occasionally lyrical documentary, you might not remember the names of everyone involved in the extended dialogue that makes up THE 11TH HOUR. It doesn’t matter. The ideas they expound, and the passion they exude, will remain indelibly etched in your mind. Their goal isn’t just to rehash the environmental ills of the world, global warming, toxic pollution, et als, but rather, to put them in context, and then to offer solutions that are radical in their simplicity and their concept. That they are also eminently achievable without sacrificing either a robust economy or the high standard of living currently enjoyed in the First World isn’t just radical, it’s sublime.
Filmmakers Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen have divided the film into three parts, each introduced by DiCaprio. The first offers Stephen Hawking giving the introductory précis on the roots of the ecological crisis that planet Earth is facing. The usual suspects, including the Industrial Revolution, come in for a well-deserved indictment, but the film goes further. Instead of just ecological experts and activists talking, there are also psychologists and philosophers who delineate insights into what it is about human nature that has brought the world’s ecosystem to the brink of collapse.
The second charts the effects of said brink, and the corporate infrastructure that keeps the fossil fuel-based economy going is dissected with a precise succinctness that does nothing to lessen the impact. Using imagery throughout gauged to provoke visceral reactions in the viewer, global warming, for example, is represented by a floating body in New Orleans to decisively bring the full impact of Katrina home. Context is given for the implications of the legal entity status of corporations, the influence on government that keeps any new, sustainable energy down, and the suggestion, buttressed by compelling arguments, that nature itself deserves the same legal protections as those corporations. Maybe more so since protecting the environment is ultimately protecting ourselves.
The third part is the most exciting and the only flaw in this otherwise excellent film is that there is too little of it. Rather than working against nature, taming it as the old paradigm has it, shift to mimicking natural processes. The example of how Kevlar is made, using petroleum and high temperatures, is contrasted with how a spider turns its prey into web filaments that are stronger than steel using water-based chemistry done at room temperature. By the time this segment ends, it’s easy to wonder why humankind has been trying, badly, to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Among the green architects, conservationists, and activists, it’s Paul Stamets, a mycologist and author, who is the star. With little screen time, he enthuses about how mushrooms and their network of mycelium can remove toxins from the environment by seeding an area with spores with results that are safe, cheap, and hugely effective.
The speakers, bioneers and scientists, businessmen and statesmen, architects and journalists, are edited in such a way that their comments become a daisy-chain of evolving ideas, giving the film a palpable forward momentum. There is a rich diversity of personalities, from the twinkle in David Suzuki’s eyes as he talks about people being out of balance with nature as though he were describing a wayward child that needs guidance, to the steely resolve of Tzeporah Berman, Campaign Director & Founder, Forest Ethics. Annotating their words is that veritable mosaic of images skillfully edited and making their own impact, elegiac, poetic, and horrific. There are the usual scenes of toxic sludge, melting ice caps, intercut with scenes of stark beauty and imminent menace, such as a lake on fire. Underscoring it all is a haunting, unobtrusive music track whose mournful bass line unmistakably shares its rhythm with a beating human heart.
THE 11TH HOUR is nothing less than a complete rethinking of the relationship between humankind and the planet on which it lives. Complex, challenging, mind-expanding, and sometimes mind-blowing, it’s cautiously optimistic, but clear-eyed in its appraisal of what needs to happen next. It’s a resonant and reasoned call to action.
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