Here's a big, cuddly hug of a documentary from the director of "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective."
"I Am" is an Oprah-endorsed mashup of thought-provoking ideas and metaphysical mumbo jumbo that is about how every living thing is "connected."
The Oprah endorsement explains how a movie with no "names" attached, thin distribution and no marketing cash still drew 50 people in a Winter Park (Fla.) Village matinee, where I caught it. I'll bet the "Atlas Shrugged" folks are kicking themselves for not considering a trip to Ms. Winfrey's inviting couch. But then, Oprah's all about altruism, Ayn Rand wasn't.
Tom Shadyac was just another rich, successful Hollywood laugh merchant, bouncing from "Bruce Almighty" to "Evan Almighty," when a mountain biking accident gave him a concussion and a severe case of post-concussion syndrome that brought him to the edge of despair. "I was done," he narrates.
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So as he recovered he decided to use his wealth and celebrity (a big joke here is how few folks he interviews have ever seen one of his movies) to explore the big questions of our age, and every age - "What's wrong with our world and what can we do about it?"
Using news footage, clips from movies old and new (including some of his own) and interviews with big thinkers from Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky and David Suzuki to a lot of lesser-known folks who spend the movie quoting Darwin, Einstein, Emerson and a Southern gent who quotes the Persian poet Rumi, Shadyac builds a case first for the evolving nature of science and for a new "science" that turns traditional attitudes on their head.
It's a refreshing movie that advocates kindness and compassion as being built into our DNA, that suggests that "competition" is perhaps what one interview subject says the Native Americans saw it as - "a mental illness."
When Shadyac is sorting out his life (he doesn't talk about his divorce, just hints that he recently went through one), figuring out that he's just been collecting "stuff" when he should have limited himself to "stuff that matters," the film's on solid ground. This is a personal journey, one even less-famous people who can't get Oprah's ear have been on.
The movie's jumpy, short-attention-span editing is very entertaining during its opening third, less effective as the movie wears on.
Yes, point out the threat that environmental degradation poses. But ignore the fact that people live longer, better, healthier lives than ever and you kind of load the argument that the world's a bigger mess than it's ever been. And it is the height of naiveté to suggest the warring, disease-ridden and sexist societies of the Native Americans "had it right," when they were not that different from us. Only less successful, living war-injury-shortened lives without inventing an alphabet or many of the other contrivances that Western civilization brought.
"I Am" - which takes its title from a quote from G.K. Chesterton, who answered the question "What's wrong with the world today?" with "I am" - is a movie that plays better in the theater than it stands up to scrutiny. I got to a computer and started looking up the "experts" Shadyac hung out with, the Heartmath scientists who demonstrate how Shadyac's emotional state impacts yogurt bacteria wired to electrodes in a nearby Petri dish, to one expert in particular, credentialed as from the Noetic Sciences (Socratic and New Age-y at the same time). My "What the Bleep Do We Know?" alarms went off. To be sure, the famous people here talk in more innocuous terms about the better angels of human nature, but a lot of the other folks are spouting New Age hogwash masquerading as "science."
As documentaries go, there's something to be said for a movie that's hopeful and comforting and that connects Jesus to Emerson to Einstein and Gandhi in their philosophies and makes the case that they were telling us something about "cooperation" that only now are animal-behavioral scientists able to back up - that democracy and consensus building are in our DNA and that of a lot of other species.
But what "I Am" is wanting is a sense that it actually wrestles with anything, that it can stand up to a contrary point of view the film's 76 minutes are so utterly lacking. Entertaining? Yes. But serious? About as serious as a guy who made Jim Carrey "talk out of his butt" once can manage.
Review
"I Am"
**
• Unrated, with a couple of instances of profanity.
• Director: Tom Shadyac.
• Cast: David Suzuki, Desmond Tutu, Howard Zinn, many others.
• Running time: 76 minutes.
