Tall ‘Tale’?

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.

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