A Single Focus: Michael C. Ruppert’s Doomsday Vision (original) (raw)

Movie Review | 'Collapse'

Single Focus: An Outsider With Doomsday Vision

Connecting the dots between oil, population and energy: the author Michael C. Ruppert is the subject of a documentary.Credit...Bluemark Films

Collapse

NYT Critic’s Pick

Directed by Chris Smith

Documentary

Not Rated

1h 22m

Nov. 5, 2009

“What movie did you see last night?”

“A documentary called ‘Collapse.’ ”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s just one guy explaining why human civilization in its present form is doomed.”

“Huh. But did you have a good time?”

Well, that depends. Factor in variables like personal ideology, current-affairs savvy and where you land on the temperamental continuum between optimism and pessimism, and you will leave the theater either fortified with told-you-so smugness or slightly wobbly on your pins. A chilling monologue of imminent catastrophe, “Collapse” is not just sobering; it’s a full-on assault. Filmed over two days last March, in the basement of an abandoned meatpacking plant in downtown Los Angeles, it showcases the singular obsession of the author Michael C. Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer and investigative journalist who has seen industrial society’s tipping point in the rearview mirror.

Since 2001, Mr. Ruppert has devoted his life, two books and a self-published newsletter to connecting the dots between population, economics and energy, and concluding that the center will not hold. Lucidly and with weary conviction, he cites evidence for a declining global oil supply (like costly offshore drilling in Saudi Arabia) and demolishes hopes pinned on substitutes like ethanol (“a complete joke”) and clean coal (“no such thing”).

His well-rehearsed rhetoric is shockingly persuasive, and since the majority of his premises are verifiable, any weakness in his argument lies in inferences so terrifying that reasonable listeners may find themselves taking his advice and stocking up on organic seeds. (Those with no access to land can, postapocalypse, use them as currency.)

Though illustrated here and there with snippets of crude animation and archival film, “Collapse” based on Mr. Ruppert’s book “A Presidential Energy Policy” is for the most part just a man, a chair and a smoking cigarette. The austerity of the surroundings evokes both a monk’s quarters and a prison cell. Along with the predatory camera and agitated, Philip Glass-style score (by Didier Leplae and Joe Wong), the setting seems designed to kindle associations with the work of Errol Morris, particularly his filming of Robert S. McNamara in “The Fog of War.”

Off-camera interjections by the director, Chris Smith, heighten the resemblance, though where Mr. Morris adopted an insistent, bullying tone, Mr. Smith sounds more detached. At times the film dances dangerously close to parody, revealing a faintly mocking undercurrent that surfaces when, for instance, Mr. Ruppert expresses his belief that those running the world have lost control, and the director cuts to stock footage of what appears to be the captain of the Titanic.

Mr. Smith’s back catalog is still small, but it’s clear that he shares with Mr. Morris an attraction to people gripped by vainglorious passions. His style, however, can verge on cruel: his ghoulish attention to the ailing uncle of Mark Borchardt, the Milwaukee misfit at the center of the 1999 documentary “American Movie,” suggests a filmmaker troublingly lacking in empathy. Here, his clinical, interrogation-style setup of Mr. Ruppert may be inspired by his subject’s past confrontation with the C.I.A., but it also plucks uncomfortably at the fine line between shining a light on society’s outsiders and exploiting them.

The joke, if there is one, misfires. Maintaining his dignity in an environment that seems custom designed to diminish him, Mr. Ruppert, who looks like your favorite high-school math teacher and lives in California with his beloved dog, Rags, resists becoming merely an oddball specimen. Presiding over collapses both financial (he is currently behind on his rent and facing eviction) and spiritual, he exhibits the deflated resignation of someone who’s tired of banging a drum that few care to hear.

“We have waited so long for someone to listen to us,” he blurts out emotionally as the film is winding down, and the outburst is unexpectedly moving. Delusional thinker or tragic prophet (he predicted the current financial crisis almost five years ago), Mr. Ruppert emerges finally as an authentic human being, sympathetic even when the film that embraces him is not.

COLLAPSE

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Chris Smith; based on the book “A Presidential Energy Policy” by Michael C. Ruppert; directors of photography, Max Malkin and Ed Lachman; edited by Barry Poltermann; music by Didier Leplae and Joe Wong; produced by Kate Noble; released by Vitagraph films and FilmBuff. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. This film is not rated.

A correction was made on

Nov. 17, 2009

A film review on Nov. 6 about “Collapse” referred incorrectly to the use of stock footage of what appears to be the captain of the Titanic. It is presented in the context of people in positions of authority having lost control; it is not introduced “abruptly.”

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