Peel away vicious banana attack to find disturbing censorship tale

HALFWAY through watching this movie at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, I found myself turning around to look at the audience. "Is there a spy from Dole here?" I wondered, the paranoia finally rolling to a boil.

As a critic, that's not something I normally do -- despite my geek soft spot for conspiracy theories of any kind. But Big Boys Gone Bananas!* was substantially different from just about any other movie I had ever seen -- as the exclamation point and asterisk in the title might suggest.

Sure, it looks goofy, maybe even precious or overly earnest. But it's the first of many pithy layers of content in this film that spirals to the very core of our current reality, and the invisible strings that can turn the media into puppets.

The title nods to Fredrik Gertten's previous film, Bananas!, a documentary that chronicled Dole's courtroom drama with banana pickers in Nicaragua. The workers sued the world's largest produce grower for knowingly poisoning them with toxic pesticides.

The suit dragged on, and Gertten followed. By the end of the process, Dole was pronounced guilty, and Gertten had a finished film about a David and Goliath struggle in Central America.

Given the original film documented events in the public domain, and covered by international news sources, Bananas! looked like another "issue doc," and could have easily slipped under the radar -- until Dole decided to sue Gertten for defamation.

Before the film's U.S. premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Gertten was served with a cease-and-desist order. He was shocked, but the bigger surprise lay ahead: The festival was also receiving pressure from Dole and its legal team, and instead of sticking up for artistic expression, the sponsor-laden festival decided to cave to some of Dole's demands.

Within hours, Gertten's film was suddenly suspect. His reputation as a filmmaker and a journalist were damaged, and with a deep-pocketed persecutor, he had next to no chance at public redemption -- without telling his story on screen.

Big Boys Gone Bananas!* documents every nauseating twist and turn along the path, beginning with Gertten and his co-producer opening the FedEx package with the first batch of weighty legal pages.

This might look like the one moment in the film that seems re-enacted, perhaps, for the camera and narrative's sake, but Gertten said he was warned the package was coming and decided to roll camera then and there.

As a result, a lot of what we see looks like a personal diary of events, because it is exactly that: Gertten, the filmmaker and former journalist, talking to other people in front of the camera.

It's all very intimate and, at times, almost voyeuristic. Yet, where Michael Moore's presence as verite mediator can be irritating, Gertten is from Sweden, where "low profile" defines everything from the furniture to the landscape. You can tell he's there only because he absolutely has to be: This story is about him.

Dole not only launched legal action, it hired one of the most powerful PR firms in the United States, and they were incredibly successful at spinning the story.

The film shows how just how easy it is to discredit truth-seekers if they have no cash in their pockets, and no friends in corporate America.

A must-see for any member of the media, as well as those concerned with free speech, Big Boys Gone Bananas!* makes an excellent issue film, but what makes it a truly great movie is the way it brings an emotional and honestly human dimension to the claptrap and spin consortium that affects us all, whether we want to admit it or not. If you're ready to swallow the red pill, you're ready to go to bananas with the big boys.

-- Postmedia News

Other voices

Selected excerpts of reviews of Big Boys Gone Bananas!*:

An eye-opening look at the way the U.S. media fell lockstep behind Dole's claims.

-- Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times

A provocative look at what can happen when corporate power takes aim at independent film.

-- Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

The film's protests of censorship ring hollow given its selective version of the truth.

-- Simon Abrams, Village Voice

A David-and Goliath story that delves into corporate scare tactics, legal effrontery, brand protection, media manipulation, online propagandizing and craven behaviour.

-- John Anderson, Variety

An occasionally fascinating, if ultimately reductive, showdown between First Amendment rights and corporate power.

-- Andrew Schenker, Time Out New York

Movie review

Big Boys Gone Bananas!*

Directed by Fredrik Gertten

Cinematheque

PG

90 minutes

Four stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 10, 2012 D4