There’s a lot of buzz around “Arctic Tale,” the family film opening in theaters today. Even before its wide release, it “already seems to be a front-runner for the ’07 documentary Oscar,” William Arnold writes in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
If that’s true, it will likely be competing against the year’s biggest documentary, Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”
Should it matter that, if veracity counts, neither of these films is a strict documentary?
The genre has undergone a renaissance in the last few years, moving out of the art house on the strength of such box office hits as “March of the Penguins,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Fahrenheit 9/11.” At the same time, docs have become more tendentious, with filmmakers using the form as vehicles for their personal views on subjects ranging from the obesity epidemic to the war in Iraq.
The new, more polemical documentarians don’t mind tinkering with inconvenient facts in the service of a larger “truth” — to the point that it’s getting harder to tell where a documentary ends and a fiction feature begins.
“Arctic Tale” is certainly being sold as a documentary. The tag line on the film’s poster is “A real adventure in the coolest place on earth.” Both industry trade magazines, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, described the film as a documentary in their reviews. Children and their parents seeing the film are likely to think its story of a bear cub and a walrus calf is fact.
But, while the footage is real, the story is not.
Queen Latifah narrates the coming-of-age tale that follows Nanu, the cub, and Seela, the calf, from birth to motherhood in the seemingly unwelcome environs of the Canadian Arctic. But Nanu and Seela are actually composites of various bears and walruses husband-and-wife filmmakers Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson filmed over the course of 1½ decades in the Arctic.
In other words, the film “follows” two characters in a narrative that is actually made up.
It might not be such a problem if Mr. Ravetch and Miss Robertson weren’t using this cutesy story, co-written by Al Gore’s daughter Kristin, to score an ideological point about global warming’s endangerment of polar wildlife habitats.
“But something is different this year,” Queen Latifah intones about the lack of ice during a period of warmer temperatures. And what year would that be?
“Arctic Tale” fails because it tries too hard. It’s not just the moral of this tale. The animals are adorable, and the gorgeous shots of a mostly unexplored landscape are mesmerizing. But if you’re not distracted by the heavy-handed message, you will be by the exceedingly embarrassing, far-too-long scenes about passing gas (yes, there’s more than one) and eye-rollingly silly use of songs. (Do we need 10 minutes of “We Are Family” and “Celebrate”?)
The narration is also a bit much. Fun lines like “That’s just how they roll” soon turn into questionable anthropomorphizing: “Meanwhile, Seela’s tusks have filled out nicely and the boys are taking notice. She knows what they’re after … She has standards, unlike some other females she knows.”
But it’s that blurring of the line between fact and fiction that proves most frustrating. Miss Robertson, in an interview with The Washington Times’ Jenny Mayo, defended the use of composites in her film. “We’re not making up the story. The footage speaks for itself,” she says. “Every single scene is inspired by our own observation and/or science, literature, and it is true.”
But it’s hard to trust the filmmakers’ science, no matter how it was “inspired,” when even some of the sounds the animals make were recorded at a zoo after the fact.
Memoirist James Frey was eviscerated on “Oprah” when it was revealed that his books, published as nonfiction, took liberties with the facts for dramatic purposes. Never mind that he, like Miss Robertson, might have been trying to teach a lesson.
Documentaries, on the other hand, are rewarded for their sleight of hand.
“Sicko” is one of the best reviewed films of the year, even though Michael Moore’s film is disingenuous to the point of disbelief. He paints a rosy picture of the Canadian health care system, for example, but the only Canadians he talks to in any depth are his own relatives.
“Arctic Tale” comes from the studio that distributed another global warming warning, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” It was produced by National Geographic Films, which also did “March of the Penguins.” That family-friendly tale of animal mating won the “best documentary feature” Oscar two years ago — even after its director, Luc Jacquet, told the BBC, “This film is not a documentary.”
But then, the trend isn’t so new. “Nanook of the North,” the 1922 film considered the first feature-length documentary, is even less real than “Arctic Tale.” Every scene in the film was staged, with the title character’s wife played by a woman who wasn’t his. That didn’t stop the International Documentary Association from naming “Nanook” sixth on its list of the top 20 documentaries of all time five years ago.
Still, for more than eight decades, documentaries have mostly done just what the name implies: documented reality. Albert Maysles is (along with his late brother and collaborator) the man with the most films on that IDA list. The legendary director of “Salesman” and “Gimme Shelter” told me earlier this year, “It’s somewhat unfortunate that so many films are dedicated to a point of view rather than allowing the viewer to exercise his or her own judgment.”
A documentary, Mr. Maysles believes, should give the viewer “an insight into what’s going on in the world” — rather than just one filmmaker’s mind.
National Geographic Films President Adam Leipzig has also defended “Arctic Tale.” “It isn’t fictionalized in the way that ’Transformers’ is fictionalized,” he told the New York Times.
But children can tell that the Decepticons aren’t real, while they can’t tell that Nanu’s fight with global warming isn’t. And children are “Arctic Tale’s” real audience. The film ends with children on-screen offering advice such as, “If you tell your parents to buy fresh food instead of frozen, you’ll be saving energy and animals.” (Of course, those extra trips to the grocery store will burn more gas.)
If even adult Academy Award voters can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, how can we expect children to?
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