With To the End, director Rachel Lears highlights the crucial difference between the importance of a documentary and what makes that documentary worthwhile. The subject here is of urgent importance – indeed, perhaps of the utmost importance, beyond social progress and political parties and even the ongoing racial reckoning. Each of those, after all, is occurring on a planet that, within the next few hundred years, could become uninhabitable for humans. The trajectory of the documentary follows a couple of years in the lives of two politicians and two political activists doing the hard work of forcing a solution to the dangers of climate change (broadly speaking, the warming of the planet, but with more specific focuses, too) into reality. This alone obviously makes the movie valuable for at least one viewing – to be introduced to some who are at the frontlines of this fight.
The star of the show is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose biography was also ultimately the focus in Lears’ last documentary, 2019’s Knock Down the House. That film chronicled the campaigns of four women to run for seats in the United States Congress and was a bit insightful and pretty entertaining while doing so. It worked as a brief introduction to some important people, but this follow-up/sequel-of-sorts has far more important things in mind. That’s not to mention the undeniable fact that the entire political environment of the United States and the world around her has changed, even since the release of that movie. Only paying lip service to a handful of activists isn’t enough this time.
The narrative, for instance, is a little more scattershot as Lears struggles to find a focal foothold. Ocasio-Cortez is busier and, thus, less open to the camera at this point, which picks up about a year into her tenure as representative of New York’s 14th district in the House and covers roughly the year following that (some of the way into the ongoing global pandemic, for a reference point). Still, she has embraced her promised focus upon the environment, symbolized by the so-called “Green New Deal” that she introduced and co-sponsored with Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey. We all know what happened with that deal in the face of centrists within the Democratic Party and an unusually weaponized Republican opposition.
Lears simply shows us a lot of the process that was already quite obvious, and then the film introduces us to some other people who join in this fight. The most intriguing are Alexandra Rojas, a political commentator for a major news network and the executive director of Justice Democrats, and Varshini Prakash, an impassioned climate activist and the executive director of Sunrise Movement. Each of them threatens to steal the spotlight this movie has on Ocasio-Cortez in terms of screen time, and the film’s best material follows these two women as they lobby for politicians to stop taking money from the oil and gas industries.
The final figure followed in To the End is Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a policy writer working on the Green New Deal with Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but as compelling a figure as she is onscreen, Gunn-Wright disappears into the background of the main narrative all too often. That, ultimately, is the problem with a documentary like this one, which reaches too far across a wide range of topics, only to distill it to a handful of political profiles at the service of some talking points. There is no doubt that this issue is fundamental to a functioning and existing society. This documentary is simply not the film to tackle it head-on.
Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions
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