Destroying the World to Save It

Reviews of the animated "9," Gerard Butler's "Gamer" and the enviro-doc "No Impact Man."

Neveldine and Taylor work the line between giddy excess and deliberate self-parody. They populate the film with outsized characters, including one called Rick Rape, and use their cameras like bludgeons, swooping and darting with frantic abandon. (Both directors, who met while shooting skateboard videos, operate cameras as well.) “Gamer” is loaded with tongue-in-cheek critiques of its ultraviolent culture, like the billboard that reads: “It’s not murder. It’s ‘Slayers.’ ” But they indulge as much as they attack. When the camera zooms in on the spandex-clad ass of Kable’s wife (Amber Valletta), who’s doing time as one of “Society”’s sexbots, the line between subversion and softcore disappears. Only Paul Verhoeven makes disentangling onanism and autocritique such a thorny pursuit.

“Gamer” has its uncomplicated pleasures, particularly Hall’s turn as a casually amoral good ol’ boy whose business attire hides a mean set of muscles. The movie’s acme is an impromptu dance number set to Sammy Davis Jr.’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” where Castle and his remote-controlled minions do a quick shuffle step before turning on Kable en masse. But without the sustained lunacy of the “Crank”s to keep it hurtling forward, “Gamer” founders and flags, never piercing the heart of its satirical targets. When it stops, it dies.

Documentaries have a way of determining their own subjects. The ostensible focus of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s “No Impact Man” is writer Colin Beavan’s attempt to zero out his environmental impact over the course of a year. But the drama that drives the movie is the impact that decision has on Beavan’s marriage, and the implicit question of whether the extreme measures needed to wipe out their carbon footprint are sustainable within the context of family life. Of the two questions Beavan asks at the film’s beginning — “Is it possible? Is it probable?” — the latter proves the more salient.

Beavan and his wife, Michelle Conlin, seem like a classic odd-sock couple: He’s a history buff with a bent for social activism; she’s a Business Week staffer with, as she puts it, “an intense relationship to retail.” He strategizes family dinners made with root vegetables from the local farmers’ market; she cooks her first meal after the age of 40. That she resists some of her husband’s edicts, particularly the ban on coffee, which hails from outside his self-imposed 250-mile radius, is hardly surprising. What’s surprising is that she agrees to go along at all.

As the year goes on and Beavan’s plan moves through its phases, his measures become more extreme, and sometimes farcical. Switching their toddler daughter, Isabella, to cloth diapers makes sense; eschewing elevators does not. The gimmicky nature of Beavan’s enterprise (which includes a book contract) unsurprisingly angers some environmental activists, who attack him for trivializing their more pragmatic efforts. Particularly once he phases out electricity, the film takes a turn for the absurd. As Beavan fiddles with a pair of nested clay pots designed to replace their refrigerator, his whole enterprise begins to seem like a fool’s errand.

But when Beavan begins to doubt the sanity of his quixotic undertaking, Conlin’s support system automatically kicks in. As they sit in a Manhattan apartment lit only by candles, she talks him out of ending the experiment prematurely, citing not its eco-virtuousness, but its positive effect on their family. Doing away with the TV has meant more time entertaining each other; turning off the lights has forced them to spend more time at the park. She’s magnanimous enough that his refusal to sign onto a complementary project she proposes late in the film seems stubborn and even churlish.

As a guide to green living, “No Impact Man” isn’t much help. It’s hard to see many people leaving the screening and heading home to replace their toilet paper with reusable rags. But as a portrait of a marriage, and particularly the way spouses negotiate the tensions between disparate goals, it’s insightful and often moving, a microcosm of the battle between lofty ideals and pragmatic concerns that lies behind any social transformation.

Sam Adams is our guest critic for the month of September.

“9” and “Gamer” are now open in wide release; “No Impact Man” opens in New York and Los Angeles on September 11th.

[Additional Photos: Gerard Butler in "Gamer," Lionsgate, 2009; Michelle Conlin, Isabella Beavan and Colin Beavan in "No Impact Man," Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2009]

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