Attenborough looks back in tearful anger
IDON’T think I’m giving away a trade secret by revealing that newspaper obituaries are often written while their subjects are still breathing. And if you judge films on their titles, it seems a 94-year-old naturalist has tried to get in on the act with
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet.
But apart from a brief glimpse of his childhood, Sir David gives us nothing about his personal life in his touching but rather alarming film which he calls his “witness statement” about the health of Planet Earth.
As he has explored the farthest reaches of the natural world from the dawn of airline travel to the modern day, he could be the only person qualified to make this prognosis.
To say it isn’t good is something of an understatement. As he recounts melting ice caps, soaring temperatures, dying oceans and destroyed forests, we realise why he irradiated himself to deliver his opening monologue from Chernobyl.
With this verdict, the backdrop needs to be as apocalyptic as possible. It turns out A Life On Our Planet is an obituary, just not for its subject.
Sir David’s evidence is horribly convincing. The human race is destroying the very ecosystem that sustains it. We are blindly marching towards our own extinction.
But at least he has some archive footage from happier times. Grainy black and white films take us to the 1950s when Sir David began shaking paws and travelling the world for the BBC.
This was “the happiest time of my life” he says with a brief smile before the dark clouds begin to return. Since then, “on average wild animal populations have more than halved”, he says. “Looking back, those forests, plains and seas were already emptying,” he adds. Which must take the shine off his memories of that adorable pangolin.
Then, something quite extraordinary happens. Sir David loses his temper. “Human beings have over-run the world,” he declares.
“We’ve destroyed it, we’ve ruined it,” he sniffs, looking away from the camera, perhaps choking back tears for a lost Eden. Then after a heartbreaking pause, he finally begins to rally. “But it’s not all down and gloom,” he suddenly pipes up, albeit slightly unconvincingly.
Apparently, we can still turn back the clock. Humans can be persuaded to have fewer children and eat less meat, he claims. Fishing-free zones can bring life back to barren seas, more efficient methods of farming, as already practised in the Netherlands, will require less land.
“We can re-wild the world,” he says. Then he’s back in Chernobyl doing what he does best – spying on the cute critters who have made their home in the abandoned city.
After all he has witnessed, Sir David is approaching his 11th decade with a smile. I wish I had his optimism.
We get more grim predictions in
a breezy if not entirely successful attempt to bring French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 bestseller to the screen.
Here documentarian Justin Pemberton uses mildly appropriate clips of period dramas to spruce up Piketty’s number crunching as we learn how he believes capital has misbehaved itself since the 18th century.
The genius of his thesis is its simplicity. As the return on capital is higher than economic growth, unearned wealth and inequality are destined to grow over time.
Pikkety sees the extreme divisions of
Capital In The 21st Century,
Victorian Britain returning as low-paid tech jobs and new pools of inherited wealth create a new generation of haves and have-nots.
Again, the attempt to end on a positive note feels a little unconvincing.
Politics is kept very personal in
Miss Juneteenth, an assured and refreshingly unshowy debut feature from Channing Godfrey Peoples. Set in Peoples’s Texan home city of Fort Worth, the film opens with Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) unpacking the crown and gown she wore 15 years ago when she won Miss Juneteenth, a beauty pageant to celebrate the emancipation of Texan slaves in 1865.
When we cut to her next she is brandishing a toilet brush like a sceptre and curtsying in front of a very different kind of throne. Turq, as she is known, now cleans toilets and waits on tables in a bar where she is working to raise $800 for her 14-year-old daughter’s Miss Juneteenth gown.
As it’s clear Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) is only entering the contest to please her mother we know big dramas are ahead.
The pace is slow, but a smart script and excellent performances keep us hooked.
A pair of cute dogs can’t provide enough bite to 23 Walks, a dreary late-in-life romance starring Alison Steadman and Dave Johns. Captions counting out their early meetings while dog-walking on Hampstead Heath promise some trickery from writer/ director Paul Morrison.
Will he really chart a relationship in 23 strolls in the park? Not so much. After a while, he gives up counting before cruelly abandoning the dogs to focus on Dave’s housing problems.
Steadman is excellent, Johns isn’t. This meandering romance soon loses its way.