FRANNY Armstrong established her agitprop credentials with the 2005 documentary McLibel, which charted the highly expensive and ultimately unsuccessful case McDonald's took against two activists (a gardener and a postman) who distributed critical pamphlets outside their fast-food outlets.
Climate change is the theme of Armstrong's The Age of Stupid, made over the course of four years and with a passionate sense of urgency. It adopts a fictional framing device wherein Pete Postlethwaite is the last man standing on devastated Planet Earth in 2055. How he survived is never explained but essentially beside the point.
“The amazing thing is that we had the power to prevent this,” he intones gravely while using a touch-screen to access a global archive of newsreel footage from
a refuge north of Norway. “We could have saved ourselves, but we didn’t.”
To illustrate the malaises of our present-day society, which left this legacy, the film assembles a mass of data targeting rampant consumerism; oil as a source of wealth and power and as the cause of wars; the upsurge in air travel now that it’s cheaper than taking trains; the rejection of wind farms because they spoil the view in Middle England; and the inaction of governments across the world.
Much of the information imparted is already widely disseminated, but what’s alarming is how little has been done to address the issues raised.
The Age of Stupidmakes its points persuasively and in an entirely accessible manner over the course of its briskly edited duration, building to a new version of the Doomsday Clock: a calendar countdown year by year, disaster by disaster, from now until 2055.
The film runs the risk of preaching to the converted – and its preachy tone is undisguised and upfront. Still, it ought to be borne in mind that the Al Gore-fronted An Inconvenient Truth(showing on both RTÉ 2 and Channel 4 tomorrow night) was one of the longest running films of the decade here, playing for more than three months at one Dublin cinema.
Directed by Franny Armstrong. Starring Pete Postlethwaite Club, IFI, Dublin, 92 min★★★
