The grains of truth
Cast: Christopher Walken, Zach Braff, Christina Ricci Director: Clark Johnson Duration: 1 h 39 m
I’ll be honest — when I started watching Percy, the thought at the top of my mind was: How is Christopher Walken going to pronounce the name of agribusiness giant Monsanto? Will he insert some weird pause, inflection or stress? MON- santo? Mon ... sanTOW? Mons-and-tow? ( True story: I once gave an additional half-star to the prettygood movie One More Time solely on the basis of Walken referring to the ’ 90s rock band the Flaming Lips as the FLAME-ING Lips.)
But I digress. Walken gives a remarkably undemonstrative performance as Percy Schmeiser, a Saskatchewan farmer who locked horns with the multinational Monsanto in the late 1990s over the matter of some seeds. The company alleged that the farmer had illegally planted some of its genetically modified canola in his fields. He said it must have blown in on the wind. They took him to court.
In one of the more heavy- handed allusions in director Clark Johnson’s film, Percy keeps driving past a giant Monsanto billboard. “All you’ll see is yield,” it promises. Yield is also what everyone in town keeps telling Percy to do, including small- town lawyer Jackson Weaver (Zach Braff, injecting just enough goofiness into the suit-and-tie role).
But Percy, convinced he’s innocent, won’t budge. Soon his case catches the attention of an anti- GMO advocate ( Christina Ricci), who pressures him to keep on fighting. Ricci’s is an odd character in that she’s presented as something of a city slicker with her own agenda, but ultimately comes off as being on the right side, at least by the screenplay’s reckoning.
In fact, there isn’t much in the way of a flesh- andblood villain in this story.
Monsanto remains a mostly faceless adversary, represented by lawyers and the occasional hired lackey.
So we watch as Percy makes his way through the court system, backed by a twangy score and some nice folk tunes by Canada’s David Francey, among others. It’s all pretty lowkey, but the film does a good job of reminding us that the stakes for Percy and his family couldn’t be higher. The fifth- generation Prairie farmer — we see him telling his granddaughter how his ancestors brought seeds over from the old country — risks losing his entire livelihood on legal fees if the courts rule in Monsanto’s favour.
But while his wife (Roberta Maxwell) and son (Luke Kirby) and even his lawyer may waver, Percy never falters.
The outcome was a ruling the Supreme Court of Canada handed down in 2004, but Percy is a much more entertaining way to find out how the story ends. ★★★