Leo DiCaprio Takes Up Where Al Gore Left Off in New '11th Hour' Environmental Documentary

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted August 19, 2007.

Three-time Academy Award-nominated movie star Leonardo DiCaprio and his filmmaking partners, Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen, have done us a great favor. They have assembled an incredible array of passion and brainpower in their stirring documentary, The 11th Hour, to teach us just about every thing we need to know about the fate of planet Earth -- how bad things are, and what we can do to reverse the effects of humanity's rapid devastation of this planet.

The filmmakers have culled 90 minutes of brilliance from approximately 150 hours of interviews of the best of the best -- the rock stars of ecology, public policy, social critique and visionary philosophy. They have done a magnificent job. The 11th Hour is a first-class overview of the technology, the politics, the consequences of corporate and consumer behavior, and the aspirations and means to fix the mess we humans have created. As DiCaprio says, "We wanted to present the experts and have them carry the narrative of the film ..." which they do extraordinarily well. The film is great-looking as well, as the interviews are interspersed with scenes of contrasting beauty and environmental victimization -- dizzying montages, barren forests, beautiful seas, mudslides and clubbed baby seals, all set against a vast array of consumer images.

Are we at the 11th hour?

The "11th hour," of course, refers to the last moment when change is possible before it's too late to do anything. And the obvious message of DiCaprio's film is that we residents of planet Earth have reached a tipping point in terms of how we live and the impact we impose on our ecosystems. And for this reason, The 11th Hour is at times not easy to watch or come to terms with. It is a challenging, sometimes overwhelming experience that explores both millions of years of the Earth's existence in all its complexity, and the immediate present and the enormous impact human behavior is having not just on the planet's climate systems, but on our oceans, our air quality, our forests and the communities we live in.

Green Day Rock Star Billie Joe Armstrong captures the importance of the film nicely:

"The 11th Hour is intense. It tells us the truth that nobody wants to hear: that human beings, especially greedy corporate executives and their politician cronies, are responsible for putting our planet in serious danger. If things don't change soon, life on Earth may not survive. It has to be this generation that breaks the chain between the polluting corporations and the crooked politicians, this generation that changes its habits so there's something left for other species and the people who come after us.

"There is hope. We can make changes in our everyday lives, and most of the technology we need to move forward, we already have today. What we really need is the leadership, and the will, to change."

What shines through 11th Hour overwhelmingly is the warmth, charisma, caring and unbelievable wisdom of the diverse collection of talking heads in the film, and that goes for DiCaprio as well. Leo plays a key role of intermediary in the film, stepping in to summarize and clarify, and he even occasionally holds corporate America's feet to the fire. He does a convincing job, even though he appears far less harrowed than he was in his brilliant role as an undercover cop barely surviving in Boston's criminal underground in Martin Scorsese's recent Academy Award-winning film The Departed.

I wondered whether DiCaprio would hold the worst of the environmental offenders accountable. DiCaprio was a little reticent at a press conference before the film's opening in Los Angeles on Aug. 10, where he stated flat out, "It is not the point of the film to make people stop consuming." DiCaprio's hope for 11th Hour was that it would make people to vote with their dollars and push corporate behavior to become more environmentally responsible.

Our wasteful consumption

But it seems clear from the film that if we just started "buying green," behavior that DiCaprio hopes that 11th Hour will promote, we are not going to make the difference necessary to save the planet for the coming generations. We've got to tackle the issue of consumption head on. Betsy Taylor, founder of the organization Center for the New American Dream, says in her appearance in 11th Hour basically that the American way of life is about working really hard for long hours, making money and going out and buying things, and then starting over and repeating -- a system totally at odds with the sustainability of our planet.

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Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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