So I finally got around to watching the No Impact Man documentary.
The documentary follows the life of a man whose goal it is to make “no net impact on the earth” for a year. He and his family (well, really his family does just as much, but it’s called the no impact “man” which I’d be a little peeved about if I was his wife) go without TV, non-locally grown food, toilet paper, trash, and six months in electricity to see if it is possible to live in a completely green way.
I had heard fantabulous reviews, but to be honest, I was a little disappointed. You know when you get invited over to someone’s house for dinner, and the couple starts arguing about who was supposed to pick up the milk on the way home, and you are awkwardly trying to pretend like you are really interested in their wall calendar and can’t hear what they are saying?
That’s kind of what watching this movie is like. The couple gets into a lot of awkward arguments about why are they doing this, why she has to play along, if they should have a second kid, etc. I’m sure it’s very “real” but I ended up just feeling like an unwilling voyeur.
Another problem I had was that the documentary was not very educational. I think I was expecting a movie version of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma which artfully combines personal experience with real world information. This movie, on the other hand, solely focuses on the personal experiences of the family, with the no-impact-man himself spouting out a few claims here and there about why recycling was bad.
It also gave me flashbacks to the early days of JVC when we were trying to decide just how “green” we should be.
On the other hand, it is interesting to watch someone actually talk about the things most of us just read about doing. It didn’t leave me feeling very inspired but it was worth a watch. It would’ve been a great knit-through movie, but my fingers have blisters all over them from trying to fix my Chaco straps. And that’s about as hippie as I’m gonna get today.
Check it out if it interests you, but if not, that’s fine too.
Well, I’m substantially less interested in it after reading your review.
But this: “on the other hand, it is interesting to watch someone actually talk about the things most of us just read about doing” makes me want to find some more interesting blogs to follow where people do exactly that.
I had read so much hype about this film that there weren’t any surprises left when I actually saw it. Still, it was cool to see how they embraced some of the changes and were willing to admit some things didn’t work so well. The marital squabbles distracted from the main message, and I found myself wondering how this latte-swilling reality show addict and enviro nut ever got together in the first place.