World Premiere, 84 min., Color
Country and Year: USA (2006)
Director: Randy Olson

Review by: Charlie Prince
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

It was once thought that documentary filmmakers had a code that insisted they remain “objective” in their filmmaking, almost like a newspaper reporter who is obligated to report “just the facts.” The films of the Maysles brothers (Salesman, Grey Gardens), among many others, are celebrated for their powerfully unintrusive style of filmmaking. Today that standard is changing, and to the extent that documentaries of old were like newspaper articles, the well-executed, but openly one-sided Flock of Dodos: the Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, which played at the Tribeca Film Festival this past Sunday, is more like an editorial.

I remember Errol Morris once described the premiere of his then recent Mr. Death, saying that when Fred Leuchter, who is the subject of that film, saw it for the first time he felt that it was a “fair” portrayal, even though at times Leuchter was heavily criticized in the film. To my mind, that’s the golden standard of a great documentary – if the subject you are criticizing or someone of the viewpoint you disagree with sees it and says “it’s a fair portrayal,” then you have a sense what is said onscreen is accurate.

So I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to make of Flock of Dodos: the Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus. It is not mean-spirited (though some of the interview subjects are) and it does give face time to its opponents, but I think it’s obvious the opposing side would not call the film “fair” the way Fred Leuchter did in the face of a critical portrayal of himself. From a cinematic or editing perspecitve, Flock of Dodos is very well executed, and at times very funny, but I find myself squirming at the “editorial documentary” model, even though objectively it seems like there’s nothing wrong with it. After all, the filmmakers are very open about their own bias, so there’s no concern of it falsely pretending to be a balanced portrayal. Still, it seems like one would have to see an editorial-style film made by someone from the opposing viewpoint to have a sense of having “documented” the controversy for oneself.

Dr. Randy Olson is the director and star/narrator of the film. He’s an evolutionary ecologist and firmly on the side of opposing teaching “intelligent design” in school science classes. The film explains how Olson heard of the debate and what the debate is. He explains that contrary to what you might expect (what they call “toothless hillbillies with pitchforks”) a new breed of people have risen up, arguing that intelligent design theory requires no religious convictions to be taken seriously. We meet the leading thinkers of that movement, such as Dr. Michael Behe and Dr. Jonathan Wells who describe the debate in their own words. They emphasize that you might see a mountain and account for it using scientific descriptive phenomenon, but when you walk by Mount Rushmore it’s clear there is an intelligent design at work, that someone must have acted with intent to create that mountain face. They apply this logic to the study of science, and in the “irreducible complexity” of the structure of a cell, or the inter-relation of proteins, they think they see the equivalent of Mount Rushmore, another phenomenon that evidences intelligent design.

Olson disagrees with this theory, thinks intelligent design theory is a religious-driven theory (that it’s based on intuition, which is similar to faith) and thus that it ought be kept out of schools because of the constitutional obligation to separate church and state. He interviews many accomplished evolutionary scientists (many of them during a poker game) and asks them to explain why they unanimously oppose the introduction of intelligent design theory in schools. At one point they give examples of “unintelligent design,” having some fun with the digestion process of a rabbit – the rabbit must pass food all the way through it’s system, and then after it has been excreted, eat it again in order to get the benefit of the nutrients. After a cartoon shows us how this works, Olson and a friend make a joke out of the rabbit “eating it’s own poo” using live night-vision footage of a real rabbit. This light-hearted goofiness that underlies the serious arguments in the film, does a lot to make the movie fun, and it is significant that for the most part (contrary to another trend in documentary filmmaking that I don’t like), the pro-intelligent design advocates are not the brunt of the jokes – arguably the rabbit’s habit of re-consuming processed food is equally amusing (or not) regardless of which side of the debate you fall on.

A central point of the film is the argument that the anti-intelligent design community is not well spoken for. Scientists, though very intelligent otherwise, are not known for being great communicators (some fun is had by flashing definitions on the screen of words like “quixotic” that the scientists keep using in their interviews). And because these scientists don’t respect the arguments for intelligent design, their reaction is to simply ignore them like a bad hypothesis – they don’t organize to combat them.

On a related point, Olson notes that in the political arena in which the intelligent design argument is taking place, to convey a message you need to tell simple, clean stories. One interviewee says the intelligent design theorists are good at telling such simple, clean stories (adding with a jab that they’re “not constrained by the truth”), and that they have talking points, like the Mount Rushmore example, and the bumper sticker slogan to “teach the controversy.” The scientists that oppose intelligent design theory have nothing approaching talking points, and Olson has some fun quizzing the eccentric-looking evolutionary scientist Dr. David Bottjer on what would be on the evolution bumper sticker.

“How is it that my side,” Olson’s film asks, which he notes is comprised of endless PHD’s, “is losing this political battle?” His answer is they are like the dodo – an animal that became extinct because it was so unable to adapt to its changing surroundings. If their viewpoint is to survive, the scientists will need to adapt to the world of talking points and sound bytes. Some time is spent contrasting this with the funding sources for the intelligent design speakers, which he traces back, Fahrenheit 9/11 style, to a mysterious organization called the “Discovery Institute,” which refused to be interviewed.

One thing’s for sure, whether Olson is taking time to poke gentle-fun at his mother, or showing joking graphics of Mount Rushmore at oddly funny times throughout the film, the process is fun to watch. Although Olson has followed in the model of Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 in terms of being an editorial-styled documentary, it is far more light-hearted in its humor. Perhaps this is true in part because personal attacks are not made on the intelligent-design speakers, even though scientists who are interviewed do occasionally call the group as a whole “a**holes” and other non-complimentary words. But while the decision not to engage in personal attacks makes the film more palatable, it does not resolve the question raised at the beginning of this review: what would the opposing side say? Would they think the documentary was fair? And since the answer to that is almost certainly “no,” does this film avoid being simply propaganda for one viewpoint?

I think it’s plausible to argue that the film has a useful purpose (to some). Arguably, the film is intended for an audience similar to the audience that watched it at the Tribeca Film Festival – an audience that overwhelmingly does not respect the intelligent design theory. Perhaps this film is intended to be educational to an audience of a known political viewpoint, to jump-start them into not being “dodos” and to organize around talking points, or simply to entertain them.

I can’t think of anything improper or misleading in that type of documentary, even if it is technically propaganda (defined as “information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause”). So perhaps the trend towards editorializing rather than making objective “documents” of fact is a perfectly legitimate approach, but personally these movies leave me wanting to hear the rebuttal, no matter which argument I side with. In the end I find what Errol Morris did with Mr. Death more impressive, a higher level of documentary filmmaking than an editorial piece like Flock of Dodos. It’s not easy to present a viewpoint and have the opposition describe your assessment as fair, but it can be done. Despite its good nature and competent execution, I think Flock of Dodos would have been a better film if it had taken that path.

ADDENDUM:

After writing this review, I emailed Jack Cashill, one of the advocates of intelligent design who was interviewed in the film to see if I was right in saying he would call the documentary one-sided, or whether on the contrary he thought the documentary was fair. This was his response:

“Errol Morris is something of a gold standard. I think particularly of “Fog of War.” To Olson’s credit, he lets the audience know who he is and what his bias is. Nevertheless, through the first 2/3 of the movie he does an admirable job of keeping his biases in check. In the last 1/3 of Dodos, Olson has to explain why the ID proponents come off looking better than the scientists. His thesis is that the ID people are good at PR while the scientists are hindered by their “blind obsession for the truth.” Left unsaid is that the same blindly obsessed Harvard scientists we see in the movie recently booted their president, Larry Summers, for daring to suggest a possible answer to a scientific conundrum that the rest of the world knows to be true–namely, that men and women are hard wired differently. The Catholic Church treated Galileo more fairly than Harvard treated president Summers, and the scary thing is that I do not exaggerate.

Feel free to quote me. I raised this issue at a post-movie debate and Olson, to his credit again, publicly agreed with me (although it does undermine his thesis).”

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::: Tribeca Film Festival Site

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© Charlie Prince