IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT
Produced & Directed by Marshall Curry & Sam Cullman
Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories
USA. 85 min. Not Rated
 

If a Tree Falls provides no easy answers for its audience. While directors Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman create a sympathetic film around Earth Liberation Front (ELF) member Daniel McGowan and his legal woes, they refrain from answering the bigger questions over whether the ELF’s mission and crimes were justified or whether ultimately they helped or hindered the environmental movement at large. This ambiguity elevates what could have easily been a preachy film to a deeper and more emotionally entangling level, one that immerses the viewer within the moral dilemma. In doing so, it actually opens up these ideas to broader audiences, helping them understand what the ELF was about, when otherwise just hearing the word “terrorist” might make them shut down.

The ELF began in the early 1990s in the U.K. as a non-hierarchical group dedicated to safeguarding the environment through monkey wrenching—acts that hinder or destroy corporations’ ability to exploit natural resources. While using many of the same tactics as political terrorists, such as forming cells that report to no one, the ELF has engaged in over 1200 actions without the loss of any human life. In the mid-’90s, a cell in the Pacific Northwest began using arson as a tactic, attacking businesses, such as timber companies and wild-horse slaughterhouses, among others. The central ethical problem for ELF is: how do you fight a criminal act, or at the very least, an ethically abhorrent act, if you feel powerless? What tactics are open to you? Is complete nonviolent resistance the right path?

There is a bodily sadness to the film as well. In one scene, Bill Barton of the Native Forest Council, shows the viewer an example of a hacked 500-year-old tree, a casualty of clear-cutting. Entire forests have thus been decimated (95% of the standing native forests in the United States, he notes). It’s difficult to not feel sad and angry for this loss of history and the loss of our connection with that past. While the philosophical issues are certainly more complex, Curry and Cullman do a skilled job of setting the scene and putting the audience in the moral position the ELF cell found themselves in.

Structurally, this is what makes If a Tree Falls so compelling. It is a small human interest piece, a true crime story, and a larger morality play all at once. Curry and Cullman strike the right balance between all three, getting the audience involved in a visceral way while engrossing them in a crime narrative, much like David Simon did on The Wire. There are no bad guys in the film. There are just people with certain beliefs trying to figure their way through a complex system. Cops brutalize protesters, activists mistakenly burn the wrong building, and collaborators betray each other. Ultimately, all these stances and acts are understandable in some way. The unanswered question is though, does that justify their actions? Andrew Beckerman
June 8, 2011