Political-cause documentaries aren’t always handsome to look at; creating a feast for the eyes is not the goal. The goal is to expose a perceived problem and stir up some outrage about it.
“The Last Mountain” gets extra points because it does capture a beauty (sometimes a terrible beauty) in its subject. The place is the Appalachians, where “mountaintop removal” has proven an effective way for coal companies to go mining for profits.
The particular focus is on the Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, where local folks are trying to stymie the plans of Massey Energy to work its particular dark magic on the area.
According to the movie, Massey’s track record is dismal at best. The litany includes weakly built sludge containment pools, an increase in cancer cases in towns near mining projects, a questionable record on safety (and most of this was filmed before the disaster at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine in April 2010) and the desecration of the mountains themselves.
Director Bill Haney also does a detailed job of showing Massey’s influence over West Virginia politics. Industry and government are doing more than just making goo-goo eyes at each other, to say the least.
Massey insists it breaks a few environmental eggs because it means jobs for the region. Haney builds a case attacking the truthiness of this argument, demonstrating that the higher the Massey profits go up, the fewer people they actually hire.
The people around Coal River Mountain are so committed and fierce that it actually comes as a letdown that “The Last Mountain” promotes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as its central figure. A longtime environmental activist, Kennedy is certainly no celebrity jetting in to lend his glamour to the cause, and he does make some strong arguments when face-to-face with industry bigwigs.
But (and this is not his fault) the film tends to romanticize him, as though it needed a hero. It already has a bunch, in the people of West Virginia (some of them miners) who have had enough of being pushed around.
The movie has a little too much of the cookie-cutter approach for this kind of thing: jazzy onscreen graphics, too much music, sense of uplift at the end so viewers don’t feel helpless. But the case is made pretty strongly, no where more strongly than in the lushly photographed shots of the forested mountains of West Virginia, and the pulverized hills beside them.
“The Last Mountain”
This political-issue documentary looks at “mountaintop removal” coal mining, and catalogs the lousy record of Massey Energy as the company fixes its gaze on Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. Even with its over-familiar style, the movie makes a strong case against the practice, and its handsome photography capture the beauty of the mountains, and what they look like after they get pulverized.
Rated: PG, for subject matter
Showing: Varsity
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