A scary movie that's also funny, touching and good for you - that's Robert Kenner's documentary about the American food industry, Food, Inc. In a decade when fiction filmmakers everywhere have been struggling to revamp conspiracy thrillers from the 1960s and 1970s (most recently German director Tom Tykwer in the Clive Owen-Naomi Watts vehicle The International), Kenner, best known for his work on PBS' American Experience, pulls it off with humor and humanity.
Right from the brilliant opening credits, he treats the contemporary supermarket as a carnival fun house - brightly painted, cunningly designed, full of false signals and outright traps. Then he takes off on an investigation of American industrial farming and how it sells chemicals and addictive substances like salt, sugar and fat to a population getting sick from them.
Like tobacco giants before they crumpled under the weight of public outcry, American food giants have blocked scrutiny of controversial practices and withheld information from packaging.
In this movie, their obstinacy and secrecy backfire: Big Agra becomes a villain almost as hissable as Big Pharma became in The Constant Gardener (the best recent fictional conspiracy thriller). For good reason, critics have compared Food, Inc. to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. The movie unblinkingly depicts hideous conditions for animals and cheap immigrant labor alike, whether in industrialized ranches or slaughterhouses. But the film is also like Frank Norris' The Octopus and The Pit. It diagrams networks of manufacturing, finance and transportation that have run the old-fashioned American independent farm into the ground.
What Food, Inc. calls for is the creation of new organic methods, habits and traditions. Yet the movie isn't doctrinaire: It applauds Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm when he sells organic yogurt to Wal-Mart, an act that radicals decry as collusion with the enemy. In the funniest aside, one Stonyfield supplier proudly tells visiting Wal-Mart honchos that she has never set foot in their store.
This movie transcends propaganda because of its wit and skill as filmmaking and because of the array of fighters, writers, people of conscience and full, flawed human beings Kenner assembles to bring home his points. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, are the film's expert witnesses. Happily, there's nothing slavish or reverent about its treatment of them.
