Rating: ****
Every year, there’s at least one
documentary that makes you frightful for the immediate future of the human race:
Food Inc. made us scared of what we eat, An Inconvenient Truth
made us afraid of the weather, and this year at TIFF that film was Last Call
at the Oasis, and its issue is water, or rather the growing lack of it. Director
Jessica Yu uses high-production standards and a calming tone to make people
aware of one inexorable truth: we have a serious problem with the quality and
availability of our fresh drinking water.
Smartly, Yu immediately puts the focus not
on far-flung places in the world where we typically consider drought and lack
of water to be an issue, but right in our backyard in places like Las Vegas and Southern California. Sure, this
issue is global, as the film tells us that half the world’s hospital beds are
taken up by people with water-born illnesses, but predominately Yu brings the
issues home and makes a case that our “water footprint” in North America, is dangerously
out of sink with our resources and usage worldwide.
Yu brilliantly draws the dangers by
reinforcing the domino effect. In Las
Vegas, about three per cent of
the city’s water is used for those magnificent fountains along the strip. Due
to a variety of factors, water levels in the Colorado River are going down. The
Colorado, being where Vegas draws its water, are now looking to northern Nevada who fear
that Vegas tapping into their taps will sap their wells dry. Meanwhile, at the
Hoover Dam, which is fed by the Colorado, water levels currently sit at 1086 feet. The turbines stop
spinning and generating electricity at 1050 feet.
Compounding to the loss of water, the water
that remains is in danger from not just overuse, but from chemicals and
pollutants as well. Enter Erin Brockovich, who once famously fought against a
large corporation polluting a small town’s water and thus killing the inhabitants,
and still fields dozens of requests daily from people looking for help. Sometimes
the documentary feels like it’s going to break out into Erin Brockovich 2,
but she’s a significant and recognizable figure on this issue and her
prominence is understandable.
What’s interesting is that in spite of the
somewhat apocalyptic idea of running out of fresh water, and the idea that we’re
kind of screwed in any case, Last Call is surprisingly upbeat. You don’t
walk about this movie with a cloud of doom over your head, and at least feel
elated because there’s some indication that on the ground there’s a growing
recognition of the problem, which is more than can be said of climate change
six years after An Inconvenient Truth.
Last Call at the Oasis makes a compelling case, and does so with a light touch. It’s well
made, well researched and certainly makes an impact with breaking you over the
head with a diatribe. I’d say that this documentary is cool drink of water, but
I think that there might be some implied waste there.
