An Inconvenient Hour

Of all the things to make you pause, ticket in hand, before entering the Millerton Moviehouse, consider the first five minutes of “The 11th Hour,� the new documentary on climate change.

   No sooner have the lights dimmed and the advertisement’s for Tri-Corner real estate ended than we’re informed — against a backdrop of mudslides and oil spills — that “our biosphere is sick.â€�

   As if thing’s weren’t already bad enough, Leonardo DiCaprio appears to read an excerpt from “Consciousness and the Environment,â€� his summer term paper on global warming.

      Arriving in theaters a little more than a year after “An Inconvenient Truth,â€� “The 11th Hourâ€� was written and directed by the sisters Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners, and narrated by DiCaprio, who also serves as film’s producer and, probably, its financier. In his previous roles (Howard Hughes and the doomed tough of “The Departedâ€� among them) DiCaprio has shown himself to be nothing if not ambitious. Having conquered Hollywood, the California Gomorrah, the actor has set out for the more pious territory of public service. He’s itching to inherit Al Gore’s title of First Citizen.

   Damned if I believe it myself, but watching “The 11th Hourâ€� I began to miss Gore, with his attempts at a humorous and folksy wisdom. “The 11th Hourâ€� is so solemn and anxious as to make “An Inconvenient Truthâ€� look like, say, a National Geographic special on the joy of fly-fishing. That said, if “The 11th Hourâ€� is easy to ridicule, it is also possible to appreciate the documentary as a kind of public service, something noble and entered into with less than joy.

   “The 11th Hourâ€� is fashioned in the mold of a PBS documentary, with 50 or so scientists, statesmen and assorted figures discussing the environmental challenges of the 21st century, spliced in with various images and graphs supporting their conclusions.

   To their credit, Peterson and Conners have gathered a diverse cast, which counts among its members Mikhail Gorbachev, former CIA director James Woolsey and the physicist Stephen Hawking. (There are a number of less impressive figures, too, thrown in for the bargain. Here I am thinking of the pale, bearded figure who talked of the wonders of mycofiltration.)

   Their thesis is simple and unanimously agreed upon. Nature is dying: overpopulated, overconsumed, verging on collapse.

   The villains are rounded up and named. They include carbon dioxide, deforestation, an oil-based economy, all contributing to what one environmentalist refers to as a “convergent crisisâ€� of climate change and mass-extinction.

   These are symptoms.

   Really, the problem is man, all 6 billion of us and counting, crowding the world with highways, power plants, and farmland.    

   To keep things moving, the filmmakers interrupt the interviews with images of environmental collapse.    Appeals are made to both reason and emotion, the latter often outweighing the former.

   In one instance, we’re told that 90 percent of the ocean’s large fish have disappeared, and then we are subtly shown an image of a seal being clubbed to death.

   “The 11th Hourâ€� brightens a bit at its conclusion. It’s inspiring to hear Woolsey talk of the American mobilization in six months following Pearl Harbor as a blueprint for retooling the economy in an environmental mode. Others invoke America’s capacity for technological and industrial achievement, as proof that the country can change its gas-guzzling ways, if only it would summon the willpower.

   The flesh is weak.

   Maybe that’s why “The 11th Hourâ€� is such a bad-tasting cure.