By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2006; C05
Who killed the electric car, asks "Who Killed the Electric Car?," and then answers: the usual suspects.
Oh, you know. Any entity with the modifier "big" in front of its name: Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Government, Big Power.
In other words, the film is what might be called the paradigm of the modern documentary -- it's slick, entertaining, almost certainly predetermined in its approach, nonchalantly leftist, openly advocatory. I actually prefer such a thing: It's much fairer to announce your biases and proceed vigorously from them, damning the nonbelievers, than it is to pretend to something nugatory called "objectivity," then cook the books and look affronted when accused of cooking the books.
Chris Paine, who wrote and directed the film (and was an electric car owner himself, according to press reports), doesn't cook any books. You know where he stands when you read his film's title: He is investigating a murder.
Paine begins with a neat history of the little things -- 70 years of history, which most non-electric-car people will be surprised to learn -- but quickly enough gets to the core of the issue, which is his examination of the fate of General Motors' much-ballyhooed variant of the product announced in the early '90s, marketed and sold in smog-soaked California before being declared a failure and mysteriously disappearing.
A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.
For example, Paine wastes entirely too much time on the fate of the actual cars, and follows a small group of anti-GM activists (with a few celebs thrown in) as they monitor the automobiles' progress to the crusher. (GM never sold the cars; it only leased them, then recalled them when the project was abandoned.) You'd think it was small children or puppies being fed into the maw of that giant Arizona eater-of-cars, instead of a small, nerdy-looking battery-operated near-car.
The style is cinema verite as he stays with the activists as they track the car shipments from Los Angeles eastward toward death. He cares, I think, too much for these people, as they aren't representative of anything; they're a self-selected group who clearly got on the electric-car bandwagon as early as possible out of a fanatical, predetermined environmental commitment.
And you'd also think GM was violating a law or something, or committing a felony. The company was destroying its own product, its own property. It gets to do that. You and I, we get to do that. If we own it, and it's not alive, we can smash the hell out of it, and nobody should act alarmed and affronted. I should know. I murdered a really snarky remote the other night and I haven't been arrested yet.
On other issues, the film is a little saner. It explores the complex nuances at play in this situation, and unlike some other liberal documentaries, quotes people on both sides of the issue, even if you never doubt which of those two sides the film is on.
But it does point out that the cars were able to go only 60 miles on a single charge. Because I commute 74 miles a day, I'd either have to move to Columbia or get used to abandoning Sparky the Wonder Car in Laurel. Great Mexican food there, but what do I do on Monday, when Tippy's is closed? The film admits that, yes, that is a sort of a market weakness, but hastens to point out that stronger batteries would be eventually (or even rapidly) available.
It addresses the awkward issue that an "electric car" is really just one step removed from fossil fuel consumption, and that in order to create the electricity that goes into the batteries, you still have to consume a hell of a lot of fossil fuel, in the form of big, messy chunks of carbon called coal, or natural gas.
And it understands that there is such a thing as a market, and you can't make people buy what you think is best from them. They get to buy bad things, like SUVs, deer rifles, tickets to wrestling matches, cigarettes, bottles of bourbon, fur coats, hamburgers and the novels of Dan Brown. Tragic, I agree, but nevertheless part of that thing called freedom.
When it's not slinging unjustified scorn about, it does manage to make some worthwhile points. It seems (to me, at least) it does a pretty good job of demolishing the illusion of the hydrogen fuel cell, upon which many have pinned hopes of liberation from Middle Eastern oil supplies (and, ergo, Middle Eastern politics). And it endorses most warmly the hybrid car, in which a small electric motor is used to significantly boost gasoline-engine performance and mileage, a gentler solution to our problems that would allow our nasty Big industries to survive and continue to employ millions of decidedly non-nasty people, would not necessitate a massive reinvention of our infrastructure and cut way down on the poison drifting in the air. I'm no rocket scientist, but that one seems pretty much a win-win for everybody.
I will say that I think Paine errs when he leaves one Big suspect out. Sure, blame Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Gov and on and on. But what about . . . Big Sanctimony? Really, these crusaders have got to seriously think about an image makeover. This movie is insanely addicted to celebrity culture, and it thinks it's making its case by showing us how upset Peter Horton is.
Oh, the humanity, the humanity! Peter Horton is upset!
This guy was married to Michelle Pfeiffer. Really, how upset could he be? If you've got that on your résumé, you ought to get out of the upset business for all time.
Okay, I'm chiding Peter Horton -- he was the best of the celeb roster that included Phyllis Diller and Martin Sheen, briefly -- on the sound principle that guys that handsome should be chided whenever possible. I'm sure he's a great individual, a concerned citizen, a loyal taxpayer. The larger point is the air of moral superiority that movies like "Who Killed the Electric Car?" inevitably fall prey to. These people think they're so much better than those of us stuck in gas guzzlers. Their preening makes them so annoying that it drowns out their message. This is one case where you really do want to kill the messenger. Folks, learn some humility somewhere between now and your next lecture.
Who Killed the Electric Car? (105 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for brief, mild profanity.