The 11th Hour is the latest major documentary examination of civilization’s difficult relationship with the natural world. Produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, in many ways the film picks up where Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth left off, offering potential avenues out of the impasse we have created.
The film marries top-shelf star power with some of the most thoughtful and incisive thinkers on the planet. If this means that DiCaprio comes across as a bit of a lightweight — well… he’s a movie star. Besides, Mikhail Gorbachev is a tough act to follow. In this film, the man who initiated the dismantling of the Soviet Union, quite possibly saving the lives of billions, gravely intones, a propos of the direction civilization is headed: “We must make a principled decision to act differently.” It’s probably better not to say anything after that. Just let it sink in.
Co-directors Leila Connors Peterson and Nadia Connors faced this challenge repeatedly in assembling a parade of profoundly accomplished and thoughtful individuals. People like physicist Stephen Hawking, green architect William McDonough and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. Each holds big pieces of the puzzle in his or her hands (mostly his in this film, unfortunately). Each could be the subject of an entire documentary. Many are. But packing them in, treating them as talking heads, glosses over their awesome achievements.
Either you recognize that humanity is at a juncture, or you don’t. If you are already familiar with the challenge at hand, The 11th Hour is a laundry list of some of the most interesting currents in the world today — green design, the absurdity of waste, biomimicry, rethinking consumption and even the importance of love — reduced to soundbites. But if you haven’t already accepted the reality of the climate crisis and the need for wholesale transformation of our world, the film could be confusing. Who are all these people? Judged solely on the merits of what they are able to say onscreen, it’s a little hard to tell.
It’s a conundrum, and the only way around it is for us, as viewers, to dig deeper on our own. One good starting point is Bioneers (bioneers.org), an organization that served as a key resource for DiCaprio and The 11th Hour’s directors. Since 1990, Bioneers has sponsored an annual conference that brings together scientists, thinkers, activists and spiritual leaders to explore the idea that everything is connected. From electoral politics to enlightenment, choreography to solar panels, Zapatistas to constitutional law, the South Bronx to recycled paper and global warming to beauty — all of it.
Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers’ founder, was an advisor to The 11th Hour (he also appears onscreen; more than half the people in the film have spoken at Bioneers). But the film struggles with communicating the same depth; over three days, Bioneers evokes a holistic picture that is not quite evident in any one of the conference’s components on its own. In The 11th Hour, with just 91 minutes to work with, deep thinkers turn into a blur of suits.
Humanity, through its actions, has degraded the planet to such an extent that it is a serious question whether or not it will be able to support us in the future — and at what level of comfort. But we already have the technology to reconfigure our civilization and exist in harmony with the earth. What’s lacking is the evolved consciousness it will take to choose to use the tools we have in a way that sustains both people and planet.
Hollywood feels it, but do they get it? In one particularly tone-deaf sequence of The 11th Hour, a series of white male “visionaries” in comfortable studios alternates with grainy shots of darker-complexioned climate refugees slogging through floodwaters and trudging across cracked earth. It would be one thing if the film acknowledged and examined this contrast — it’s not as if the visionaries in question aren’t demonstrably committed to positive change in profoundly meaningful ways: we’re talking Thom Hartmann, Thomas Linzey, Ray Anderson and others — but editing it like this comes across as the kind of separation from reality that caused many of our problems in the first place.
Still, The 11th Hour is incisive in other important areas. The film does not shy away from squarely pointing the finger at one of the most problematic power concentrations in our world: greedy multinational corporations. By going here, unequivocally, it redresses one of the biggest shortfalls of An Inconvenient Truth; as a board member on many of said multinational corporations, it is no surprise Gore didn’t make the connection. Yet both films, after methodically documenting the biggest problem facing humanity, meekly suggest we tackle it by changing our lightbulbs.
We do need to change our lightbulbs, it’s true. But we also need regime change, constitutional change and a serious re-evaluation of capitalism. We need to change the organizing principles of our civilization; we need nothing less than a change in consciousness.
Either we can continue to be slaves to greed and violence, ultimately snuffing ourselves out (and taking countless hundreds of thousands of other species down with us), or we can choose to evolve. Those impulses served us so well when there were just a few thousand of us fighting it out with lions and elephants on the ancestral savannah. But now, in an environment of our own making, we need to take responsibility for ourselves and become, in a real sense, a more enlightened collective life form.
We’re at a fascinating point: either we are just beginning on our journey, at the cusp of things getting really interesting, or we’re at our high water mark and someone else — the distant descendents of cockroaches perhaps — might be able to take another crack at it in a few eons.
Even if we wipe ourselves out or, maybe worse, consign coming generations to millennia of living hell, we have at least attained a sort of rudimentary consciousness: we can see what we’re doing; we can even imagine some ways to change it and bring about a better world. The 11th Hour is a product of this inchoate consciousness. The question remains if we will be able to actually pull it off.
The only way to find out is to try, as if everything in the world depended on it. DiCaprio is making the effort, and for that he deserves our applause. But is Hollywood’s best really no more than 91 minutes of talking heads intercut with imagery of a beautiful, dying planet? Let’s hope not.
THE 11th HOUR
Warner Independent Pictures
Run Time: 91 Minutes
11thhourfilm.com