Leonardo DiCaprio‘s My Space page has just posted a video message about The 11th Hour (Warner Independent, 8.17), which he produced, co-wrote and served as one of the principal talking heads. Sound words, riveting message, and a film that definitely said it all but didn’t quite have that schwing when I saw it last May.


I don’t know if the trio behind The 11th Hour — DiCaprio and co-directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen — have followed the suggestions I posted after seeing it at the Cannes Film Festival. Good and worthy as it is, I said it needed more in the way of personality and warmth and meditative passages.
“There’s no argument at all from this corner about the alarming things it says (and shows) about what amounts to a kind of mass global suicide,” I wrote, “but it’s a movie, and the fact is that it doesn’t breathe and engage the way a piece like this should. After 20 minutes or so it makes you feel like you’re being hammered. It needs to pull back and relax and…I don’t know, throw in some jokes or something. A little more heart and soul and meditation.
11th Hour “has exactly one laugh moment — a quote from Winston Churchill that says Americans “always do the right thing…unfortunately they only do the right thing after exhausting every last wrong possibility.” Or words to that effect.
“I hate saying this about a film I respect and that I want people to absorb for the content alone, but you can’t expect well-honed information and slam-bang visuals alone to do the trick. A movie needs to generate human warmth and aroma…some kind of emotional connection that really sinks in. As it is now, The 11th Hour is too dry and didactic, and it doesn’t even try to generate the amiable personality that An Inconvenient Truth had by way of the reborn Al Gore.”
I’m just saying this in order to help. It would be an excellent thing if everyone (and I mean everyone) saw this film and then sat down and thought hard about where to go and what to do.