Green (Patrick Rouxel, 2009): USA

Reviewed by Mathew Roscoe, viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

The horrifying extent to which the human race has been ravaging Mother Earth is almost common knowledge by now. Even if you didn’t watch “Fern Gully” as a kid, you probably know that mankind, with their pesky technology and territorial expansion, has an undying tendency to destroy all of the beautiful natural habitats and thus doom the beautiful animals that lived there. It’s hard not to watch Television without there being some image of a polar bear desperately clinging onto a drifting chunk of ice or some other tragic reminder of the incalculable damage humans have caused to their own planet. And yet, in spite of how mainstream these facts are, it does not make it any less shocking, horrifying, or heartbreaking to see footage of man turning their fragile home into a putrid wasteland and destroying the lives of every other animal. In the new documentary, Green, we are shown yet another example of our inexcusable evil and crimes towards nature. While nothing in the film really comes as any surprise, it does not make what we see any less poignant. Perhaps just as tragic as the events that occur is the fact that the events that occur will likely not surprise us.

With absolutely no narration, the film takes us on a 48-minute emotional journey where we witness the last few days of Green, a dying female orangutan, a scarred victim of deforestation in Indonesia. It’s in the intimate chronicling of her on her deathbed that painfully reminds us just how frighteningly human our primate cousins really are. Alone in a world where she doesn’t belong, the pain and loss of hope in her eyes is nothing short of devastating. Even more moving is the tender bond she develops with her human caretakers. As one of the humans sits by her side, she grips her caretaker’s hand and looks up at him jut like a sick child would look up at her mother. You look at Green’s face and you can almost hear her whispering “Why do your kind do this to us? Why am I in so much pain? What did we ever do to you? That forest was my home! It was all I had!” The gradual chronicling of Green’s final days is coupled with additional footage of various other subjects. Earlier in the movie, we see footage of orangutans in their natural habitat, happily climbing trees. This picture of their lives before our intervention make it all the more painful to watch the footage of orangutans wallowing around logging sites, looking in horror at the filthy debris that used to be their beloved trees, or of the apes that are captured and stuffed into tiny cages, sometimes being sold at illegal markets. The misery in their faces is almost too much to bear. When seeing the humanity and love of these primates, and then seeing the atrocious living conditions they are forced into, one can’t help but develop a seething hatred or disdain for the humans driving the monstrous tractors and bulldozers that are ruining so many lives.

However, as powerful as the material is, in terms of filmmaking, this movie is a much more mixed bag. The choice to not have narration was a nice touch, as the imagery is really all we need, and the occasional choral music in the background effectively adds to the mood. At the same time, the cinematography is fairly weak, and the movie is shot on what appears to low-resolution digital stock, so this ‘film’ might actually be a ‘video’. The bad colors and high pixilation can get very distracting sometimes, but I can’t give the filmmaker too much stress here, because that flaw is almost certainly due to a limited budget as opposed to a conscious choice. The editing leaves a bit to be desired as well, as there doesn’t seem to be much of a plan or pattern in what is shown and what it cuts to next. It sometimes makes the movie feel like a high school video project, where some kid just obtained a good amount of mediocre footage of incredible material and slapped it together in iMovie. While the lack of production values and structure do not ruin the movie by any means, it makes it seem less like an impressive accomplishment by the filmmaker and more like a guy who was in the right place at the right time with a video camera. But in this case, that was all that was needed, as the point gets across regardless of the ‘flair’ with which it is delivered.