Food, Inc.
Directed by Robert Kenner. With Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Richard Lobb, and Vince Edwards. (PG)
Food, Inc., the new documentary about how America eats, is a bit late to the party. In the last several years the "foodumentary" has become a staple of the cultural diet—not just in films like Super Size Me or King Corn, but also in books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. The latter was also turned into a mediocre film by Richard Linklater, and both authors appear in Food, Inc.
Where Food, Inc. sets itself apart is in its unflinching insistence on the sad, hard facts about modern American food production. It includes disturbing hidden camera footage taken inside our factories, sobering facts about government policies that exacerbate the decline of our health, and interviews with a woman whose healthy two-year old died after eating an E. coli- tainted hamburger—an event that led to a landmark law named for the toddler: Kevin's Law. The aforementioned films often relied on comic underpinnings to get their points across; Food, Inc. is the documentary equivalent of a horror film.
Not surprisingly, none of the "Big Four" industry conglomerates that control our food supply wanted to go on record with the filmmakers, but the facts largely speak for themselves. Farmers are under the heel of companies like Tyson and Cargill, forced to either play by the rules of the multinationals or lose their already meager livelihoods. Workers at Smithfield, the world's largest slaughterhouse, say that the company has the "same mentality toward workers as they do toward the hogs." Cheap, illegal immigrant labor is bused in from a hundred-mile radius, but when Immigration clamps down, it's only the workers who suffer, never those who hired them—perhaps because so many government overseers recently worked as lobbyists for the companies they now police (a situation endemic to genetically modified seed giant Monsanto, whose legal chutzpah apparently beggars belief).
Food, Inc. occasionally suffers from two ailments common to documentary films: information overload and uninspired lensing. The many shots of the heartland, overlaid with statistics, often come off as stock footage, and even at a trim hour and a half, the film piles up facts so quickly that it's easy to lose track of them all as the filmmakers cover a wide range of food production. What is impossible to overlook, however, is the shameful state of our food supply, and how our national gluttony for cheap goods has made us all complicit. If the film has a hero, it's Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, a farmer/philosopher who urges resistance to an American way he sums up as "fatter, faster, bigger, cheaper."
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Also this week: Proving that the Valley's cinema scene extends beyond the confines of Northampton and Amherst, Shelburne Falls hosts a variety of film happenings this weekend at the town's historic Memorial Hall. Originally built as an opera house in the 1800s, the venue plays host to a film series that this season has screened classics including the ballet fairy tale The Red Shoes, the Kurosawa epic Yojimbo, and the Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St Louis.
Films at Memorial Hall are usually preceded by live music on the hall's spacious stage, with a rotating roster of local and regional acts appearing in front of the footlights. The result is a sense of easygoing community spirit that is rarely matched in the region. As the caretakers of the Hall note on their website: "It may not be Broadway, but it's all ours!"
This weekend, the film series brings Alfred Hitchcock's suspense classic Rebecca to the screen. Laurence Olivier stars as wealthy widower Maxim de Winter, Joan Fontaine as the young second bride he brings back to Manderley, his English estate. There, she is confronted with constant reminders of Rebecca—the first wife of de Winter—and is especially troubled by Manderley's housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who reveres the memory of her former mistress, and treats the new Mrs. de Winter as an interloper. In his inimitable style (has anyone done suspense better?) Hitchcock raises questions about the circumstances of Rebecca's death, de Winter's possible culpability, and the true nature of his marriage to Fontaine's unnamed second wife. Appearing before the film on Friday is the "literate rock" band The Ambiguities; Eric DeLuca plays solo piano before the show on Saturday. Both shows begin at 7 p.m.
On Sunday, the venerable venue rockets into the 21st century when it teams up with the United Kingdom's National Theatre as part of NT Live, a new initiative to broadcast live theater performances onto cinema screens the world over. The pilot season begins with a production of Jean Racine's Phedre, in a version starring Helen Mirren (The Queen) in the title role (the adaptation is by Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate of England).
First performed in 1677, the play tells the story of a love triangle involving King Theseus of Athens, his wife Phedre, and the King's son from an earlier marriage, Hippolytus. Believing her husband to be dead, Phedre becomes consumed and disgusted by her attraction to his son. When Theseus reappears alive, his queen slanders Hippolytus, turning father against son. One can only imagine what Mirren, a daring and talented actress who thrives in just this sort of meaty role, will do with Phedre.
On Saturday, the Zero Hour Film Series continues at Northampton's Pleasant Street Theater with Spider Baby (a.k.a. Attack of the Liver Eaters; a.k.a. Cannibal Orgy or the Maddest Story Ever Told), a 1968 comedy/horror B-movie from director Jack Hill, who went on to make the Pam Grier "blaxploitation" flicks Coffy and Foxy Brown during the '70s. In something of a remarkable coincidence, a remake of the film was recently announced, to be helmed by the director (resurrector?) of the Night of the Living Dead retread of 2006.
I can almost guarantee that the original will be far, far better—to begin with, it stars Lon Chaney, Jr. The monster-movie legend is often given short shrift by the moviegoing public, but the truth is that he possessed an individuality not many actors bring to the screen, and if he could never equal the heights scaled by his famous father, he was still able to leave his own mark, in his own way. (He was the Wolf Man immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp; his father, the Phantom of the Opera.) Here he plays Bruno, the guardian of a group of children whose peculiar genetic affliction causes them to regress into brutality. Bruno covers up the violent indiscretions of the clan, but when distant relatives show up to claim the family estate, bloody chaos breaks loose. Like all films in the Zero Hour series, Spider Baby starts rolling at midnight; admission is three dollars.
