Documentary. Unrated. 1 hour, 36 minutes. At the Mayan.
It shouldn’t take much effort for a documentary about the coal industry to make you mad. The industry’s downside seems pretty steep.
To better get at the coal seams, Appalachian coal companies blast away the tops of mountains and dump the debris on the valleys below. Sometimes people live in those valleys.
Some of those people appear in “The Last Mountain,” and they’re mad. Their neighbors are dead. Their health is failing. They’re convinced no one cares. These people don’t seem isolated, but they do seem alone. Sometimes Bobby Kennedy Jr. might walk through the front door, into a diner, or onto a coal company’s property, and express concern. “The Last Mountain” is the sort of movie that sends a Kennedy into the West Virginia wilderness to press for change. It’s sincere. It’s misguided. It feels like a stunt.
The best scenes in Bill Haney’s movie involve the first-person stories of women and men whose lives the coal companies have ruined. What they tell Haney is heartbreaking and blood-boiling.
A small group of West Virginians shows up at the offices of Joe Manchin, who was the governor then. Haney paints Manchin as being in the pocket of the coal industry. (Manchin is now in the U.S. Senate.)
There’s also a lot infuriating mileage to be got from Massey Energy, the company that owned the mine where 29 men died last year.
Haney tries to see where the industry’s coming from. He spends some time with the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, Bill Raney, who tells Kennedy that coal haters should really think about the livelihoods of the miners, and where else do you think you’d get all that electricity? The most aggravating thing about Haney’s movie is that he thinks he knows.
It didn’t seem possible to top the earnestness of the civil-disobeyers who succeed in irritating the coal companies.
But turning the movie into an infomercial for wind farms beats all.
