Last night I attended the Canadian premier of The Age of Stupid, courtesy of the Climate Action Network of Canada. The theater wasn't jammed to capacity as had been hoped. It should have been.
The widely anticipated climate change film by Franny Armstrong, director of McLibel, is a call to political action. It is also a totally engaging movie in its own right, combining live action, documentary film techniques, animation, music, and sci fi.
The film covers the lives of six individuals dealing with both the causes and effects of global climate change. Their life stories are richly detailed and span the globe: An aging French mountain guide bearing witness to glacial melt, a wealthy Indian entreprenaur starting a dirt-cheap airline, a geologist working for Shell oil, a young Nigerian hoping to train to become a doctor, two young Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, and a wind-farm developer, his wife and two kids living in rural UK. We see their journeys through clips on the screen of a future survivor played by Pete Postlewaite. He has collected and saved these images in his effort to understand why we failed to save ourselves when we still could. And in the end, he asks, "I wonder. Did we think we weren't worth saving?"
The Age of Stupid is unapologetically a cautionary tale, told from a terribly bleak future (All of our accomplishments and museum treasures are stored in the silo where Postlethwaite sits, in hopes that some day some one will benefit from them. Our animals are pickled and stored in glass boxes). But the movie does not bow to simplicity. The oil worker is not the devil. In fact, he saved hundreds of people after Katrina. The Indian air line developer wants to help poor people see the world. And when we meet the mostly charming windfarm developer, we are hard-pressed not to mock his (subtitled and grammatically challenged) French. In other words, we are none of us perfect.
The movie works for me because it simplifies neither the problem nor the solution. Yes, the situation is dire. But the film uses history (a remarkable fast-action world history animation of war, for one) to remind us that we've been stupid before. Consider slavery. Think of Women's Suffrage. The benefit of time is moral clarity. What dunces we were. What schleps to take so long to act. But act we did. We righted the world. We took action privately and publicly and found our keel. We've done it before. We can do it again. And... we have to.
Start at home. Reduce your carbon footprint. And then, step outside. Join Climate Day on October 24, the Day of Action.
And if you can, see the movie. I don't recommend it for young kids, because some images are brutal (although fleeting) and the language can be coarse. I strongly recommend it for everybody else.
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