TIME TO CHOOSE – Review

Climate change is a topic many documentaries have covered and it is easy to feel hopeless or frustrated about it. Oscar-winning filmmaker Charles Ferguson, whose previous documentaries include INSIDE JOB and NO END IN SIGHT, takes a different approach with TIME TO CHOOSE, tying the problem to other global issues, ranging from jobs, poverty, war, pollution, and mass extinction, and pointing to solutions to all through individual choice and market forces.

Beautifully photographed, with polished production values and narrated by actor Oscar Isaac, TIME TO CHOOSE is a different kind of climate change documentary. It does the near-impossible, crisply summarizing the problem and rationally presenting practical solutions that focus on the power of individual choice to move corporations, and wrapping all that up in a visually lush film that is as compelling to watch as any winning nature documentary.

This handsome, compelling documentary features intelligent, persuasive arguments for action, beautiful aerial photography and an appealing musical sound track. Director Ferguson does not waste the viewer’s time, and gets straight to the point, by summarizing the major contributors to climate change: burning coal, oil and natural gas, urban sprawl, and deforestation and industrial agriculture. It then notes that we already have practical solutions or alternatives to all of them, if we choose to use them. The film is organized into three parts examining each of those topics, which is done in a visual, effective way that smoothly blends images, voice-over, text and expert interviews.

The director wisely skips any attempt to persuade remaining climate change skeptics, as the science has been covered in previous documentaries. Instead, this film merely points out that politicians who deny climate change generally have oil and coal companies as major donors. The film also notes that the fossil fuel industry is in a fight for its life, as a change to renewable energy and decentralized energy disrupts its business model of endless supply, and is using the same tactics employed by the tobacco industry in denying the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. As the documentary notes, the fossil fuel industry represents the richest companies and individuals the world has ever seen. They will not just give up – the only way to change the game is through consumer choice.

The clever part of this film is how Ferguson focuses on the big picture, tying all these topics to climate change, and wraps it all up in a rational, even pleasant film experience – no small feat for such a heated subject. Rather than repeat what has been covered in detail in other documentaries on topics such as food production, endangered species, clean water, electric cars and even other climate change docs, Ferguson summaries those facts, and points us to those other documentaries through the people he chooses for on-screen interviews.

The documentary relies more on rational arguments with expert interviews than heart-tugging emotional appeal with testimony from ordinary people. The experts are stellar, including notables such as Jane Goodall, former U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, climatologist James Hanson, and food writer Michael Pollan.  A few ordinary people are interviewed – a woman in West Virginia whose water well was contaminated by coal mining waste and whose brother died of brain tumor linked to pollutants from mountain-top removal, and woman in Kenya who installed a solar panel on her shack, thru a company that lets people buy them by selling back some of electricity, because it was cheaper than paraffin or kerosene, the common fuel in this area without a central electric grid.

The result is a film that is at once pleasant to watch, informative and even hopeful. It is hopeful, because it presents a way to influence climate change without waiting for government action, through the market place. Just as consumer demand is driving companies to label GMO foods, offer more organic choices or more hybrid and electric cars, consumer choice can drive the move to renewable energy, the film suggests. TIME TO CHOOSE is as easy to watch as a nature film but with its clearly-made points and a view of tackling climate change that puts into the larger picture of the world’s problems, it shows how rather those challenges can all be addressed to together, by the power of ordinary people and the choices they make.

TIME TO CHOOSE is playing in theaters now.

Rating: 4 1/2 Stars