GARBAGE!: THE REVOLUTION STARTS AT HOME
Rating: ** (out of ****)
Cast: Andrew Nisker, Glen McDonald
Director: Andrew Nisker
Screened April 22nd as part of Hot Docs

Andrew Nisker’s Garbage!: The Revolution Starts at Home begins as a gimmicky documentary and ends as a fevered rant. Nisker’s topic is pollution and garbage disposal, and his approach is zippy and commercial, but he aims at too many targets over too little time, and some of what he chooses to attack is downright laughable.

Nisker’s obvious model for Garbage is Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, which he mimics like a colour-by-numbers picture. Nisker’s experiment is pretty cute: he enlists his friends the McDonald family to save all of their garbage in their garage for three months to see how much an average suburban household throws away. Things quickly get very crowded, smelly, and maggot-infested in the McDonalds’ garage. In between the McDonalds’ story, Nisker travels around North America, making discoveries about the effects of garbage on the earth, communities, and our own bodies.

Nisker is not the born filmmaker that Spurlock is, because he fails to realize that the key to making a first-person documentary work is to convey that he himself has a strong, dynamic personality. Morgan Spurlock presents himself as a good ol’ boy, and Michael Moore positions himself as a shlubby man of the people, but Nisker is a blank. He has more luck with the McDonald family, who come across as funny and charming. Perhaps Nisker should have abandoned the first-person device and given the McDonald family more screen time to develop into fully formed protagonists.

Garbage also fails to motivate its audience to save the environment. The film moves at a breathless pace as Nisker squeezes in virtually every form of pollution he can think of within the film’s slim 76-minute run time. My overwhelming feeling was not one of inspiration, but rather hopelessness. Nisker lists of so many pollutants that I started to wonder if the only way to make the world green was to revert to the Stone Age. Nisker is right to say that we use too much plastic (incidentally, this film marks the first time I’ve ever heard the phrase “plastic lobbyists”), but he also insists on pointing out that we pollute when we flush the toilet and use the dishwasher. He visits the residents of the Michigan suburb where Toronto sends its garbage, who complain that their property values have plummeted since the dump has been constructed. Well, that’s unfortunate, but the reality is that no matter how much we conserve, we’re still going to need garbage dumps, and there will always be unlucky people who have a house next to one. Nisker goes totally off the rails when he says that our decomposing bodies can harm the earth. Is he trying to say that to save the environment, we should try not to die?